[1] For a list and summary of such questions, see “Summary of Evidence for Foundational Questions in Effective Animal Advocacy,” Sentience Institute, last updated June 21, 2018, https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/foundational-questions-summaries.

For discussion of the extent to which the farmed animal movement can learn from history, see Jamie Harris, “What can the farmed animal movement learn from history?” (May 2019), https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/what-can-the-farmed-animal-movement-learn-from-history.

[2] See, for example, “Why farmed animals?” Animal Charity Evaluators, last updated November, 2016, https://animalcharityevaluators.org/donation-advice/why-farmed-animals/, Linda Tyler, “Animal Tracker 2019: Methods & Overview” (June 12, 2019), https://faunalytics.org/animal-tracker-2019-methods-overview/, and Jacy Reese, “Survey of US Attitudes Towards Animal Farming and Animal-Free Food October 2017” (November 2017), https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/animal-farming-attitudes-survey-2017#exploratory-demographic-analysis.

[3] See, for example “Research Agenda,” Sentience Institute, last updated September 24, 2018, https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/research-agenda.

[4] For a summary of other evidence relating to this question, see the section “Left-wing vs. nonpartisan focus” of “Summary of Evidence for Foundational Questions in Effective Animal Advocacy,” Sentience Institute, last updated June 21, 2018, https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/foundational-questions-summaries. The author’s hypothesis was that, given what he believed to be the failure of the movement, this tactic had reduced the chances of success for the anti-abortion movement, and this would therefore provide evidence that the farmed animal movement should avoid developing a partisan focus.

[5] See, for example, “Social Movement Analysis,” Animal Charity Evaluators, accessed July 15, 2019, https://animalcharityevaluators.org/research/social-movement-analysis/.

[6] Kelly Anthis, “Social Movement Lessons From the British Antislavery Movement: Focused on Applications to the Movement Against Animal Farming” (December 2017), https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/british-antislavery.

[7] See, for example, the section on “Terminology” in the “Abortion debate” Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_debate#Terminology.

[8] Margaret (Peggy) Hartshorn, "Putting It All Together," in Teresa R. Wagner (ed.) Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2003), 106.

[9] See, for example, “Abortion (Termination Of Pregnancy),” Harvard Health Publishing (January 2019), https://www.health.harvard.edu/medical-tests-and-procedures/abortion-termination-of-pregnancy-a-to-z.

[10] This term is also used by psychology researchers in papers on moral expansiveness, which sets a relevant precedent for Sentience Institute’s research, given our focus on moral circle expansion. See, for example:

Nick Haslam, Brock Bastian, Simon Laham, and Stephen Loughnan, “Humanness, dehumanization, and moral psychology,” The social psychology of morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil (2012), 203-18,

Takuya Sawaoka, Anna-Kaisa Newheiser, and John F. Dovidio, “Group-based biases in moral judgment: The role of shifting moral standards,” Social Cognition 32, no. 4 (2014), 360-380.

Daniel Crimston, Paul G. Bain, Matthew J. Hornsey, and Brock Bastian, “Moral expansiveness: Examining variability in the extension of the moral world,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 111, no. 4 (2016), 636.

[11] Kelly Anthis, “Social Movement Lessons From the British Antislavery Movement: Focused on Applications to the Movement Against Animal Farming” (December 2017), https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/british-antislavery.

[12] For a summary of the pros and cons of different sources of evidence, see the section “Social movements vs. EAA randomized controlled trials (RCTs) vs. intuition/speculation/anecdotes vs. external findings” of “Summary of Evidence for Foundational Questions in Effective Animal Advocacy,” Sentience Institute, last updated June 21, 2018, https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/foundational-questions-summaries.

For a more detailed discussion of the value of individual historical case studies as a form of evidence, see Jamie Harris, “What can the farmed animal movement learn from history?” (May 2019), https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/what-can-the-farmed-animal-movement-learn-from-history.

[13] As noted in the section on “Format” in Jamie Harris, “How is SI research different from existing social movement literature and relevant historical works?” (May 17, 2019), https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/how-is-SI-research-different#format, “many historians emphasize the importance of rich description and evocative narrative in good historical writing, but this is generally unhelpful or even harmful to effectiveness-focused advocates reading a research report, who need the precise and concise documentation of relevant evidence. In general, since... the aims of the research of historians and sociologists are different to those of SI, the formats of these publications vary to meet their differing goals.”

[14] Keith Cassidy, “The Road to Roe: Cultural Change and the Growth of Acceptance of Abortion Prior to 1973,” Life and Learning 7 (1998), 1-16.

[15] Henceforth “abortion” without qualification will refer to abortion at any stage of pregnancy from conception to birth.

[16] Raymond Tatalovich and Byron W. Daynes, The Politics of Abortion: A Study of Community Conflict in Public Policymaking (New York: Praeger, 1981), 18 lists the number of states passing anti-abortion enactments before 1966. In the 1820s, 2 states passed such enactments. In the 1830s, 4; 1840s, 12; 1850s, 5; 1860s, 12; 1870s, 3; 1880s, 4; 1890s, 1; 1900-1965, 7. On pages 23-4, they summarize the legislative situation for abortion in US states before 1966; describing the 14 states that reformed their abortion laws in 1966-72, they note that “[t]he original laws of these states were similar in intent’ they prohibited abortions except when the life of the woman was endangered.”

Rosemary Nossiff, Before Roe: Abortion Policy in the States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 1 notes that “It was only in the 1850s that the American Medical Association sponsored an antiabortion campaign in a bid to professionalize medical practice. By 1900, the AMA had succeeded in passing laws that made abortion illegal, except when the woman’s life was endangered, in almost every state and territory.

James W. Reed, “The Birth Control Movement Before Roe v. Wade,” in Donald T. Critchlow (ed.) The Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996; first published 1995), 26 summarizes that “The culmination of the campaigns against abortion in state legislatures coincided with the passage of the Comstock Act (1873), a strengthened national obscenity law, in which no distinctions were made between smut, abortifacients, or contraceptives—all were prohibited.”

Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 51 adds that, “[w]ithin two decades the medical community’s campaign against abortion was successful. Several more laws, referred to as the ‘little Comstock laws,’ followed the original. Some states passed more restrictive laws than found in the original Comstock Act. Over the next decade and a half, forty anti-abortion statutes were passed in the United States; by 1910 nearly every state had anti-abortion laws. Most of the laws contained a clause authorizing licensed physicians to perform therapeutic abortions, which finally provided the medical community with a monopoly over the issue. Following the passage of these laws, abortion faded from the public and political front, becoming a nonissue from the early 1900s to the 1950s.”

[17] Nossiff, Before Roe, 30-3 summarizes that “By the mid-1840s abortion was commonplace, and it probably would have remained so had it not been for the establishment of the American Medical Association in 1847… Why many physicians supported restrictive abortion laws can be traced to a variety of moral, medical, and economic reasons. Some doctors active in the antiabortion campaign believed that life was sacred. Others questioned the morality of abortion by citing the Hippocratic Oath… others became active in the campaign against abortion chiefly to restrict midwives, their main competitors, from providing health care to women.” Citing Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America (New Haven: Yale University Press), 55, Nossiff adds: “As Wertz writes, ‘Doctors worried that, if midwives were allowed to deliver the upper classes, women would turn to them for treatment of other illnesses and male doctors would lose half their clientele…’ Nativist concerns also prompted some physicians to oppose abortion.”

On page 33, Nossiff adds that “One reason for the success of the physicians’ antiabortion campaign was the absence of opposing groups. Although the nineteenth-century women’s movement was organized by the 1860s, the majority of feminists were primarily concerned with securing the vote for women. Like the antiabortion physicians, many of them considered abortions to be a degrading procedure that exploited women, and they supported the AMA’s attempts to criminalize it.” On page 34, Nossiff adds that “The timing of the physicians’ campaign coincided with the wave of professionalization in public policy that followed the Civil War.”

The social climate may also have been very different. Marvin Olasky, The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988 (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988), page xii summarizes that “19th century press coverage showed clear concern for the life of the unborn child as well as the health of the mother.” While Olasky argues that the abortion “struggle” began in 1838, he summarizes that “From 1838 to 1962 press information concerning abortion is a trickle… In 1962 the trickle became a torrent.” This provides further evidence to suggest that a focus on the 1960s is the best use of time for research on this question. On pages 92-3, Olasky argues that “In three ways 1962 was the year of the great leap forward for pro-abortion forces. First, in that year pro-abortion books and broadcasts designed for the general public, rather than elite audiences of doctors, lawyers, and liberal theologians, began to emerge… Second, the summer of 1962 brought with it a story of a double abortion murder,” and third, the case of Sherri Finkbine.

In a subsequent book, Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1992), however, Olasky summarizes on page 283 that “pro-life forces have been wrong to assume that abortion was rare in the nineteenth century, that tough laws virtually ended the practice, that doctors and ministers led the way, and that the anti-abortion consensus remained philosophically intact until the 1960s. Pro-abortion groups have been wrong, however, in their typical assertion that abortion was widely accepted before this century, that abortion was infused throughout the population, that abortion became illegal because regular doctors sought to drive out competitors, and that abortion rates generally are unaffected by illegality or the development of alternatives.”

His very speculative estimate on page 290 is that “in 1860 there were roughly one hundred and sixty thousand American abortions, in a non-slave population of twenty-seven million. (There is very little accurate information about what was going on among slaves.) Roughly one hundred thousand of those one hundred and sixty thousand abortions were undergone by prostitutes.” On page 291 he notes that he would be surprised if there were fewer than 100,000 abortions in 1860, given the evidence. 160,000 abortions works out as just under 6 abortions per 1,000 people (or just under 3 per 1,000 females, which the author of this report guesses should be approximately halved again to show approximate 1.5 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 years.

By comparison, Tara C. Jatlaoui, Maegan E. Boutot, Michele G. Mandel; Maura K. Whiteman, Angeline Ti, Emily Petersen, and Karen Pazol, “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Surveillance Summaries 67, no. SS13 (2018), 1-45 notes that in 2015, “A total of 638,169 abortions for 2015 were reported to CDC from 49 reporting areas. Among these 49 reporting areas, the abortion rate for 2015 was 11.8 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 188 abortions per 1,000 live births.” These estimates compared would suggest that there were far fewer abortions per person in 1860 than in 2015, but the difference is less than an order of magnitude. Olasky quotes very different figures for 1992, claiming on pages 291-2 that there were “1.6 million abortions in a population close to two hundred and sixty million.”

Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 51 notes that “Women who had access to necessary resources like money, transportation, and time continued to have abortions at approximately the same rate as they did before abortion was criminalized…. Many government officials and agencies did not actively enforce the anti-abortion laws. The barriers for women wanting abortion services were frequently demographic, not legal. Posner (1992) has estimated that 70 percent of the abortions occurring today would have occurred prior to the legalization of abortion.”

[18] “Our History,” Planned Parenthood, accessed October 3, 2019, https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-history. This site uses the term “opened” for the former organization and “incorporated” for the latter organization. Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Encyclopedia of Women's History in America (New York: Infobase Publishing, May 2014; first published 1996), 202 claims that the American Birth Control League was founded in November 1921. The different dates may just reflect different stages of the formal process of establishing the organizations.

[19] There seems to have been less activism in the first half of the 20th century than in the 1950s onwards, though there were exceptions. Daniel K. Williams, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (New York, Oxford University Press, 2016), 10-38 describes many such exceptions in detail. For example, page 10 begins by noting that, “[t]he Catholic doctors who gathered in Atlantic City in 1937 for the annual meeting of the National Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Guilds were worried about what they saw as an unprecedented societal assault on the value of unborn human life. The American Medical Association had just issued a statement in favor of birth control, which was bad enough, but some doctors were even beginning to argue for the acceptability of abortion… ‘Abortion,’ the Federation declared, was, along with contraception, sterilization, and euthanasia, one of the ‘pagan and irrational philosophies’ based on ‘modern creeds of unlimited sex indulgence’... The Catholic physicians therefore pledged that they would never cooperate with those who would ‘make the medical practitioner the grave-digger of the nation.’”

[20] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion.

[21] Kerry N. Jacoby, Souls, Bodies, Spirits: The Drive to Abolish Abortion Since 1973 (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1998), 3.

[22] “Statistics of the Congressional election from official sources for the election of November 6, 2018,” Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives (February 28, 2019), https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/Election-Statistics/, 59. From 1955 to 1957, the number of Democratic senators (48) was greater than the number of Republican senators (47), though technically there was no Democratic majority, since one senator is listed under the column for “Other Parties.”

[23] Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Encyclopedia of Women's History in America (New York: Infobase Publishing, May 2014; first published 1996), 202.

[24] “Participants” in Mary Steichen Calderone (ed.), Abortion in the United States: A Conference Sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1958), 9-13. 44 participants are listed. Fowler V. Harper, review of Abortion in the United States by Mary Calderone, Yale Law Journal 68, no. 2 (1958), 395-8 noted that at this time, “The usual law in this country permits a therapeutic abortion only to save he life of the mother. A half dozen states add ‘or that of her unborn child.’ Only two or three jurisdictions legalize the termination of pregnancy to preserve the mother's health.”

[25] Mary Steichen Calderone (ed.) Abortion in the United States: A Conference Sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1958). The topics discussed have a predominantly medical focus, as well discussing information on the prevalence and consequences of abortion, both legal and illegal. Some comparison was made to the more liberal legal situation in Scandinavia. The relationship between contraception and abortion was also considered. See Fowler V. Harper, review of Abortion in the United States by Mary Calderone, Yale Law Journal 68, no. 2 (1958), 395-8.

[26] M. F. Ashley Montagu, “Introduction,” in Mary Steichen Calderone (ed.) Abortion in the United States: A Conference Sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1958), 4 notes that “Abortion is not solely a medical and a legal problem. It is a social and human problem... [Our society] abandons the woman in her greatest need to the abortionist.... The amount of human suffering and misery thus entailed is enormous. The illnesses, injuries and deaths resulting from such illegal abortions add substantially to the increase of that suffering and constitute a wholly unnecessary loss to society. The socioeconomic cost of illegal abortion is incalculably great.”

[27] Mary Steichen Calderone (ed.) Abortion in the United States: A Conference Sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (Oakland, CA: The University of California, 1958), 119 records that Iago Galdston (a psychiatrist) suggested that “if and when a so-called adult woman, a responsible female, seeks an abortion, unless the warrant for it is overwhelming—as say in the case of rape or incest—we are in effect confronted both with a sick person and a sick situation.”

[28] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 39. The 1942 conference was chaired by Dr. Howard Taylor, Jr., “under the auspices of the National Committee on Maternal Health at the New York Academy of Medicine. He subsequently edited the proceedings as The Abortion Problem, but due to the war effort it received little attention in the news media.” Citing Garrett Hardin, Population, Evolution, and Birth Control: A Collage of Controversial Ideas (San Francisco: Freeman, 1969), 279, they note that "some have argued that this kind of neglect was typical of the few books on abortion issued before 1960.”

David J. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York: MacMillan, 1994), 273-76 partly echoes this account of the reception to books on abortion at this time other than Calderone’s. Garrow emphasizes that books such as William J. Robinson’s 1933 book The Law Against Abortion cautiously advocated for legalization of abortion up to the third month of pregnancy for elective reasons, and up to any point for therapeutic reasons. Robinson and Abraham J. Rongy, author of another book on abortion, were both doctors. “Neither Rongy’s nor Robinson’s book was widely distributed, but, unlike Browne, their statements were at least cited by other writers considering the subject.”

[29] Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 276. Garrow adds that “A prominent commentary in Scientific American termed existing abortion laws ‘fanatically narrow and backward.’” On pages 275-6, Garrow writes that “with the exception of Alan Guttmacher, the medical contributors to the book were a seemingly timid group, and the conclusory statement signed by the conference participants represented only the most modest and limited endorsement of liberalization.

[30] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 39. Though these books considered social implications of abortion, such as the proportion of pregnancies that ended in abortion, and in the case of the 1955 book, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, “the extent to which human life, actual or potential, is or ought to be protected under the criminal law of the English-speaking peoples,” Tatalovich and Daynes conclude on page 40 that “much research in abortion during the first half of [the 20th] century was aimed at professional audiences, not the general public.”

[31] Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 277-9.

[32] Ibid, 276.

[33] Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 282-3 notes that, “[o]n April 12, 1961, a newly elected member of the California Assembly, John T. Knox of Contra Costa County, introduced an [American Law Institute]-style therapeutic reform bill in the state legislature. Knox had never forgotten a story he had seen several years earlier about a Colorado woman who had been unable to get an abortion for a pregnancy that was the result of a rape, and an attorney friend in state government who had seen the Packer and Gampell study had reinforced Knox’s interest in the issue. The rape story had ‘made a very deep impression on me,’ Knox recalled twenty years later, and although no immediate action was taken on his measure, his initiative was nonetheless notable and unique.

“Soon after Knox’s move the Saturday Evening Post published a major, three-part series of articles on abortion by well-known journalist John Bartlow Martin. Two of the three pieces focused upon the medical horror stories of women who suffered death or serious injury as a result of illegal abortions, and repeated the estimate of perhaps five thousand fatalities nationwide each year… ‘No one,’ Martin added, ‘has proposed to repeal the abortion laws outright, though feminist movements assert the right of a woman to decide whether to continue a pregnancy.’”

On page 293-5, Garrow adds that Garrett Hardin, a “forty-eight-year-old University of California at Santa Barbara biologist” argued for women’s rights to abortion in several public speeches. In 1963, Hardin gave a speech, “now titled ‘Abortion and Human Dignity,’ to a sizable audience at the University of California in Berkeley. He reiterated that ‘any woman, at any time, should be able to procure a legal abortion without even giving a reason,’ and that such a practice—what he memorably called ‘a policy of abortion on demand’—was ‘the only morally defensible arrangement.’ The ‘underlying justification for all birth control practices,’ Hardin emphasized, was simple and undeniable: ‘to free women from a now needless form of slavery, to make a woman the master of her own body. The emancipation of women is not complete until women are free to avoid the pregnancies they do not want.’”

Garrow’s book contains many direct quotes from early advocates of abortion reform which clearly show that they had a mixture of feminist and conservative medical motivations.

[34] Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Encyclopedia of Women's History in America (New York: Infobase Publishing, May 2014; first published 1996), 202.

[35] Robert N. Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee: Its Founding, its History, and the Emergence of the Pro-Life Movement Prior to Roe v. Wade,” The Catholic Historical Review 97, no. 3 (July, 2011), 529.

Nossiff, Before Roe, 35 adds that the 1957 Planned Parenthood conference “passed a resolution requesting that the American Law Institute (ALI) and the Council of State Governments conduct studies to create a model law that could be used to update state laws on abortion. Two years later, the ALI drafted the following model penal code, which defined justifiable abortions: ‘A licensed physician is justified in terminating a pregnancy if he believes that there is substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother or that the child would be born with grave physical or mental defect, or the pregnancy resulted from rape, incest, or other felonious intercourse.”

[36] Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 281. The author of this report has no reason to doubt Garrow’s claim, though no citation is provided.

[37] Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 56-9 notes several factors “that helped transform the emerging medical differences of opinion into a social problem.” From the 1950s, “therapeutic abortion boards” were set up in hospitals. These boards decided which abortions could be conducted. Luker argues that “when there is no consensus about how to assess the criteria—as there increasingly was not in the 1950 and undoubtedly would not be today—there is an almost irresistible pull to degrade the system, to convert it into some other kind of system… As they degenerated from criteria systems into systems based on quotas and markets, their legitimacy became increasingly problematic both inside and outside the medical profession. This failure of legitimacy began to give rise to new feelings of discontent. As therapeutic  abortion boards became perceived as more and more unworkable and unfair, physicians began to cast about for other resolutions of the dilemma. And the search for new resolutions was hampered by at least two important social developments: the changing locale of medical practice and the emergence of an institutionalized ‘strict constructionist’ view of abortion.” Many of these claims are uncited. Luker explains on page 46 that the term “strict constructionists” means “those who accepted abortion only to preserve the physical life of the woman.”

Keith Cassidy, “The Road to Roe: Cultural Change and the Growth of Acceptance of Abortion Prior to 1973,” Life and Learning 7 (1998), 9 notes previous arguments (which he regards as “inadequate” explanations) that “structural changes in women’s lives and employment, the acceptance of birth-control and of the sense that control of fertility was a right, population anxieties, the civil-rights and anti-war movements, the youth culture of the 1960’s, able leaders and particular events (such as the Finkbine case)” contributed to “the rapid and complete success of the call for an unlimited right to abortion.”

Instead, on pages 10-11 Cassidy ascribes a greater causal role to philosophical and intellectual shifts that “made much less plausible the assertion that even in its early stages a fetus was fully human, whatever its appearance, and was entitled to the same absolute protection as any other human” and to greater absolute rights, including for a woman’s privacy over abortion.

Nossiff, Before Roe, 34 notes that “The AMA’s control over abortion remained unchallenged until the 1950s… A study released in 1951, however, showed that a surprisingly high number of therapeutic abortions were still being performed by physicians, though most of the reasons they gave did not, strictly speaking, constitute legal grounds for the procedure. This situation eventually led to a split within the medical profession.”

Marvin Olasky, The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988 (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988), page xii has argued that there was a change in news coverage on abortion. Olasky summarizes on page xii that “19th century press coverage showed clear concern for the life of the unborn child as well as the health of the mother” but that “Newspapers from [the mid 20th century] on both set a pro-abortion agenda and were used by those setting agendas.”

Several of the contributions in Donald T. Critchlow (ed.) The Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996; first published 1995) draw attention to increasing population pressure in postwar America and this may have led to further support for contraception, and possibly abortion by extension. John Sharpless notes on page 87, for example, that “The period from 1967 to 1974 might be described as the ‘era of unrestrained enthusiasm’ of government-sponsored family planning.”

[38] C. E. Joffe, T. A. Weitz, and C. L. Stacey, “Uneasy Allies: Pro-Choice Physicians, Feminist Health Activists and the Struggle for Abortion Rights” Sociology of Health and Illness 26, no. 6 (September 2004), 775-96 note, for example, that “Abortion reform was framed as a desire to give expanded discretion to the medical profession. This initial physician interest in abortion law reform, rather than outright repeal of existing law, would shortly put them at odds with 1960s feminist activists.”

Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 71, writing about reform efforts in California in 1959-61, argues that “abortion was taken up as an issue [in California] primarily by people who were members of professional elites. Packer was on the faculty of the Stanford Law School and Gampell was a specialist in forensic medicine; and the persons who first brought the issue to the attention of Assemblyman Knox and then Assemblyman Beilenson were professionals affiliated with the state attorney general’s office.”

On page 78, Luker quotes from an interview with a physician: “When we’d consult [our lawyers] and say, ‘We think this patient should be aborted, but we don’t know if this is life-threatening or not,’ they’d say, ‘Well, you might be sued’... And so we would go ahead on the basis that it was a life-threatning disease or situation… But there was always the implication in the background that the district attorney, if he decided to make an issue of this, it could be a legal problem because even the district attorney couldn’t interpret the law.” From this, Luker infers that, “the early physician-activists were primarily interested in securing legal backing for what they were already doing… they wanted their decision-making rights explicitly written into law, just to be on the safe side.”

[39] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 43.

[40] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 41. Williams claims that, “[i]n the pre-Vatican-II era, when politicians believed that the Church hierarchy could still deliver the votes of its parishioners, [the threat of Catholic opposition] frightened many legislators.” Williams adds on page 50 that Alan Guttmacher despaired in 1963 that, “[t]he Catholic Church is so well mobilized and makes up such a large percentage of the population that changing the law of any state in the Northeast of the U.S.A. is a virtual impossibility at least for the next several decades.”

[41] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 43.

[42] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 42-3 explain that “[o]rganized medicine viewed this matter as essentially a medical problem, but as Lawrence Lader observed, it precipitated ‘a religious and political war.’ In a state with a 40 percent Catholic population, serious opposition to the proposal was mounted by the Most Reverend Ernest Primeau, bishop of Manchester. Moreover, the ultraconservative Manchester Union Leader strongly denounced the proposed changes in the law. Its publisher was a close ally of New Hampshire’s Governor Wesley Powell. Opponents repeatedly made the argument that any abortion is murder. In reaction, Protestant denominations, through the auspices of the Manchester Ministerial Association and the executive committee of the New Hampshire Council of Churches, supported the legislation as both moral and necessary.”

Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 529 adds that the “anti-abortion leader,” Roy Heffernan of Tufts Medical College, said in opposition to the bill that “Anyone who performs a therapeutic abortion is either ignorant of modern medical methods or is unwilling to take the time and effort to apply them.”

[43] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 529 notes that “During the early 1960s minimal changes in abortion laws concentrated on granting hospitals the authority to use in-house committees to approve or disapprove of therapeutic procedures... In early 1963 California state representative Anthony C. Beilenson (D-59th District) introduced a modest bill to enlarge the scope for therapeutic abortions, although it would have legalized only 5 percent of current demand for the procedure. The bill died in committee.”

Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 67-72 describes consideration of a reform bill in California in 1961 that was similar to the American Law Institute’s model. There, aiding abortion was illegal (and the criminal was liable to imprisonment for two to five years) unless it was “necessary to preserve [the mother’s] life.”

[44] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 529 notes that “A 1955 abortion conference, although most Americans were unaware of it, called for substantial changes in abortion laws. A few sympathetic law journal articles that decade added weight to the cause, as did the efforts of a small cadre of physicians. In 1958 America magazine entered the fray, attacking the conclusions of a New York panel that favored liberalization for economic and psychological reasons. The editors warned that... ‘Deliberate abortion, like its twin, euthanasia… is the ugly offspring of the moral positivism that grounds all distinctions of right and wrong in the lawmaking power of the state.’”

[45] Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 69-70 includes a quote from an interview with Democratic Californian assemblyman, John Knox: “I was a freshman legislator in January of 1961, when [my friend] talked to me about getting an abortion reform bill introduced… I’d read an article in Collier’s about a woman who had been raped by a mentally defective person who had escaped from some institution, and was being forced to bear the child. And I just thought that was outrageous. It made a very deep impression on me at the time. So when [my friend] asked me to do this… I thought about it, and really decided without talking to anyone, particularly my normal advisers, and decided to go ahead with it. I did remember mentioning it to Senator George Miller. He was kind of my mentor at the time—he was on the Rules Committee of the senate, he’s a very devout Catholic. I mentioned to George that I was thinking of introducing an abortion reform bill. He said, ‘Have you ever met Cardinal MacIntyre?’ And I said no. He said, ‘You’re about to.’” Luker adds that “As a result of his sponsorship of the bill in 1961, Knox ‘took a lot of heat.’” Quoting him again: “I was preached against in the 1962 election from virtually every Catholic pulpit in town and received some very angry letters from priests… The next year, 1963, the decision had to be made, well, what are we going to do now? And I had some reluctance, not that I was personally afraid of it, but I just didn’t like [offending] some very close friends of mine including Senator Miller, who were literally hurt by the thing. I mean, physically, they were very upset.”

Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 53-7 describes Catholic resistance to moves towards abortion liberalization in California. For example, “Catholic diocesan papers brought the anti-abortion message directly into Catholic homes. They trumpeted the arguments of the church’s attorneys, charging that the legalization of therapeutic abortion would constitute an unprecedented attack on the nation’s constitutional foundation and the promise of the Declaration of Independence.”

[46] Nossiff, Before Roe, 36. On page 42 Nossiff notes that “In 1966, the California State Board of Medical Examiners charged several prominent physicians with performing illegal abortions though all the abortions had been for pregnant women exposed to rubella. As a result, thousands of physicians who had been previously inactive joined the reform campaign.” Pages 56-76 emphasize the importance of “competing ideas about the meaning of womanhood,” structural changes leading to emergent “political identity” for women, and their political mobilization. Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 44-7 and Suzanne Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement: Organization and Activism in the Abortion Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 14-5 present similar narratives of the importance of the Finkbine case and the rubella outbreak.

C. E. Joffe, T. A. Weitz, and C. L. Stacey, “Uneasy allies: pro‐choice physicians, feminist health activists and the struggle for abortion rights” Sociology of Health and Illness 26, no. 6 (September 2004), 775-96 add that “the case of the ‘San Francisco Nine’– occurred in 1966 and involved nine San Francisco obstetrician/gynecologists who were abruptly threatened by the California Board of Medical Examiners with the loss of their medical licenses because they had been performing abortions in local hospitals on women who had been exposed to rubella (German measles), which was also associated with birth defects. The case, however, had an unintended effect, in that it galvanized the members of the medical community, both in San Francisco and nationally, to defend their colleagues. This defense of the accused physicians can be explained by their professional stature (all held positions in prestigious local medical institutions) – unlike the infamous back alley abortionists of the day who did not receive medicine's support when they faced criminal charges. Leading figures from the medical community, joined by prominent citizens in law and other fields, formed a defense committee to pay their legal expenses. Most noteworthy, over two hundred physicians from across the country, including the deans of 128 medical schools, signed an amicus brief that was filed on their behalf.”

[47] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 40-2 note that The Readers’ Guide to Periodic Literature focuses more on popular magazines, whereas the Social Sciences and Humanities Index is more scholarly in thrust. There is little overlap between them, so this rough index represents a substantial body of the periodic literature. Since 1966, the total number of articles in both indexes was more than six times the number published from 1950 to 1965. The first real increase in the number of citations occurred during 1962.” In 1962, there were 14 publications listed by the Readers’ Guide and 5 in the Social Science Index compared to an average of 5 and 1 respectively in each of the previous three years. On page 42, they note that “A more scientific study of this media phenomenon is provided by Nguyenphuc Buutap, and it confirms these observations. Using content analysis, Buutap studied the news coverage given abortion by the New York Times from 1947 to 1977. During the 15-year period from 1947-61, the Times published 117 items on this subject. Its coverage increased markedly during the three subsequent periods of analysis: 392 items from 1962 to 1969, 584 items from 1970 to 1972, and 788 from 1973 to 1977.”

[48] Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 301 dates its formation to some time in 1963-4. “Society for Humane Abortion,” Social Networks and Archival Context, accessed July 29, 2019, https://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w6f53p00 also refers to the group as the Society for Humane Abortion” but dates its formation to 1962. Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 58 refers to the group as the Society for Human Abortions and cites its start date as 1963. Melody Rose, Abortion: A Documentary and Reference Guide: A Documentary and Reference Guide (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2008), page xiii claims that the “Society for Human Abortions” was formed on February 13, 1965. The author of this report has not checked the references in many of these claims, although Garrow cites an unpublished 1965 paper. Presumably, all these claims refer to the same group.

On Garrett Hardin’s talks, see footnote 33. Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 97 quotes an interview with an SHA activist: “When we talk about women’s rights, we can get all the rights in the world—the right to vote, the right to go to school—and none of them means a doggone thing if we don’t own the flesh we stand in, if we can’t control what happens to us, if the whole course of our lives can be changed by somebody else that can get us pregnant by accident, or deceit, or by force.”

[49] Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 296-7.

[50] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 530, citing Norman St. John-Stevas, The Right to Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963).

[51] Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, 34.

[52] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 84 notes, for example, that North Carolina passed an “ALI-style abortion liberalization bill” in 1967.

[53] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 85 notes that anti-abortion advocates had “a few major victories in the spring of 1967. All came in heavily Catholic states.” Williams lists rejections of reform in Connecticut, Maryland, and New York.

[54] Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Encyclopedia of Women's History in America (New York: Infobase Publishing, May 2014; first published 1996), 202.

[55] Nossiff, Before Roe, 2, citing Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 US 479 (1965). On pages 40-1, Nossiff adds that “Since the early 1960s, activists in California had been organizing to liberalize the state’s abortion law. Initially, Griswold’s main effect was to induce other states to join the campaign. Griswold situated the debate over abortion policy precisely because the case specifically addressed birth control… The ruling enabled pro-abortion forces to make the argument that if access to contraception was part of marital privacy and was protected from State interference, abortion should be included on those grounds as well.”

[56] “Eisenstadt v. Baird,” US Supreme Court (March 1972), https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/405/438.html. The judgement notes that “The Court of Appeals vacated the dismissal, holding that the statute is a prohibition on contraception per se and conflicts ‘with fundamental human rights’ under Griswold v. Connecticut… By providing dissimilar treatment for married and unmarried persons who are similarly situated, the statute violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

[57] Bridgette Dunlap, “Eisenstadt v. Baird: The 41st Anniversary of Legal Contraception for Single People,” (March 22, 2013), https://rewire.news/article/2013/03/22/today-marks-the-41st-anniversary-of-legal-contraception-for-single-people/.

[58] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 9-10 note that “Further liberalization came to Sweden in 1946 and 1963, and to Denmark during legal revisions in 1956, 1970, and 1973. Finland’s liberalized policy of 1950 was revised in 1970 to include abortion on demand for women under age 17 and those over 40. Norway’s 1960 reformed statute codified what had been common medical practice for years. All these countries permitted abortions for a wide range of therapeutic reasons. Before their latest revisions, for example, Denmark and Finland authorized the operation for the following: physical or mental illness that threatens the mother; rape or incest to women under a certain age; fetal abnormality; and a sociomedical provision that considered existing or potential physical and mental health problems caused by the mother's living conditions. In 1970 both Denmark and Finland allowed abortion on demand for certain categories of women, and in 1973 Denmark fully legalized abortion on demand.”

For other examples, see the section on “Case law” in the “Abortion law” Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law#Case_law.

[59] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 23-5.

[60] See footnote 47.

[61] Keith Cassidy, “The Right to Life Movement: Sources, Development, and Strategies,” in Donald T. Critchlow (ed.) The Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996; first published 1995), 139. Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 24 and 69 note that New York passed legislation in 1970 decriminalizing abortion in all circumstances.

Fred Shapiro, “‘Right to Life’ has a message for New York State legislators” (August 20, 1972), https://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/20/archives/-right-to-life-has-a-message-for-new-york-state-legislators-the.html explains that in 1972, after the passage of this liberal legislation, the group continued its anti-abortion activities, with Golden still at “the head of the table.” Shapiro describes the group as “one of the toughest—and least expected—political monoliths ever to demonstrate to the New York Legislature” and lists letter-writing and lobbying among their tactics.

[62] See footnote 45.

[63] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 76-77. Williams adds that, “[t]he League’s board of directors read like a ‘who’s who’ of the Catholic Church’s five-year-long campaign against abortion [reform] in the state.” However, the Cardinal sent letters to other bishops in the state, encouraging them to make an effort to recruit Protestants and Jews. On page 78, Williams notes that another organization, called the California Right to Life League, was also set up in the Bay Area (the Right to Life League was based in Los Angeles)..

[64] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 541.

[65] See Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 540-4. For example, on page 542 Karrer notes that, “[i]n California, medical professionals with the Catholic Physicians Guild; Cardinal James Mclntyre, archbishop of Los Angeles; and ministers attempted to derail the 1967 Beilensen bill, which was patterned after modest ALI guidelines.” Karrer notes on page 540 that in 1972, New York’s “pro-life organization had its moment of glory when it collaborated with legislators to repeal the 1970 Abortion Act. New York Right to Life raised money, sent lobbyists to Albany, demonstrated, and even warned lawmakers of political retribution if they failed to cast a pro-life vote. Pro-lifers would not vote for them. Single-issue voting increasingly became an effective tool in the ensuing years. The bill passed both chambers, but the governor vetoed the bill.”

Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 71 notes that “Early opposition to abortion originated in states where abortion rights had made minor, but legislatively formal, inroads.” Doan then cites the examples of California and Virginia.

[66] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 531-2 notes that “As abortion became a growing issue in the media and among medical and legal professionals, Catholic writers and theologians also began to deal with the subject. Journalist Russell Shaw wrote the booklet “Abortion and Public Policy,” published by the Family Life Bureau of the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) in February 1966… The Catholic periodicals America and Commonweal stood out as early opponents along with the newspapers National Catholic Reporter and the Wanderer as did the Linacre Quarterly, the very small Catholic academic journal for the National Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Guilds. Beginning in November 1965 and continuing for fifteen additional installments in the Linacre Quarterly through 1971, Monsignor Paul V Harrington, an official with the Archdiocese of Boston, wrote on varying aspects of the abortion issue. In his inaugural article Harrington said, restating the official Catholic position on abortion and providing little room for therapeutic procedures.”

On page 533, Karrer adds that one article in “the February 1966 issue of America… reflected on the ‘moral health of the American people.’ Three-fourths ‘would sacrifice the life of the unborn child to save, not the mother's life, but her health,’ and ‘more than half ... lest it be born deformed ... [was] even more significant—and discouraging.’ A Commonweal editorial a month later called upon Catholics to “exert pressure against any major liberalization of state abortion laws.”

[67] Nossiff, Before Roe, 46 describes the roles of these organizations as “to unify and strengthen the bishops’ political voice” (NCCB) and “to administer to its programs” (USCC).

[68] Cassidy, “The Right to Life Movement,” 140.

[69] Jacoby, Souls, Bodies, Spirits, 30 notes that, “[s]ince 1398, procuring an abortion has been held by canon law to be an offence that automatically excommunicates the offender from the moment it takes place. Others who in some way facilitate abortion stand in perpetual danger of formal excommunication, should an interfering cleric choose to take such a drastic step… The act of abortion undermines the Church’s ethical and moral codes in a number of areas. First, and most obviously to the abolitionist, abortion violates the Fifth Commandment in that terminating a fetus is an act of murder. Moreover, where Protestants and other Christians seek to follow the Ten Commandments, the Catholic faith defines certain violations as a special kind of offence— a ‘mortal sin’... Thus, abortion in the terms of Catholicism is not merely any sin; it is the mortal sin of murder, which removes all grace from the one who commits it and results (if not repented of prior to death) in an eternity in Hell… Protestants have never adopted the position that some types of sins are more eternally grievous than others.”

[70] “Our history & aims,” Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, accessed February 6, 2019, https://www.spuc.org.uk/our-work/history-and-aims.

[71] “Abortion Act 1967,” UK Government, accessed July 16, 2019, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1967/87/section/1. See also “Q&A: Abortion law,” British Broadcasting Corporation (June 10, 2019), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19856314.

[72] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 534 notes that “The seventy-two participants represented the disciplines of medicine, social science, ethics, and law. St. John-Stevas attended, as well as Jerome Lejeune, a noted Paris physician. Two books resulted: the conference publication The Terrible Choice: The Abortion Dilemma (New York, 1968) and John Noonan's The Morality of Abortion (Cambridge, MA, 1970).”

[73] Nossiff, Before Roe, 47

[74] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 24.

[75] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 50-1. They add that “In 1968 87 percent of Michigan physicians endorsed a new abortion law. About half wanted ALI-type legislation and the other half approved more liberal, pro-choice legislation.” They also report the results of several other surveys of medical opinion, including on issues such as rape or abortion for economic reasons.

[76] Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, 18-28. Staggenborg does not explicitly limit these claims to the late-1960s, instead discussing the 1960s in general terms on page 18. Nevertheless, the examples of groups that Staggenborg discusses, including Zero Population Growth (1968), the Women’s Liberation Abortion Counselling Service (1968), Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (1969), the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (1967), and National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (1969), were all formed in the late 1960s.

[77] Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 92 notes that, “[p]rior to 1967, the abortion debate in California was conducted in a spirit of compromise and civility; professional men and women tied to one another by bonds of colleagueship and sociability endeavored to create a new compromise on abortion that they envisioned would provide the basis for a second century of calm. But their efforts failed… women, as a self-conscious interest group, came to cast the abortion debate in an entirely new framework.”

The rest of the chapter, “Women and the Right to Abortion,” pages 92-125, details this change. For example, on pages 97-8, Luker notes that the Society for Humane Abortions conducted “leafletting, abortion teach-ins, and petitions… Finally, SHA began to take direct action by engaging in civil disobedience.” On page 95, Luker claims that “the drive for total repeal of abortion laws was carried forward by many evanescent organizations that formed for one ‘action’ and then disbanded, fairly spontaneous public activities such as demonstrations, ‘speak-outs,’ and ‘street theaters.’ Although these activities were undoubtedly instrumental in changing the public climate, they left few records and are difficult to study after the fact.” Hence, Luker focuses on the SHA. The year 1967 is treated by Luker as a watershed because that was the year in which California passed the Therapeutic Abortion Act, liberalizing Californian abortion law, with the result that “by late 1970, of all women who applied for an abortion, 99.2 percent were granted one. By 1971 abortion was as frequent as it would ever become in California, and one out of every three pregnancies was ended by a legal abortion” (described on pages 93-4). Luker doesn’t seem to provide any other justification for 1967 being a turning point in terms of women’s engagement in the movement; many of the changes that Luker describes are attributed to the 1960s generally.

Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 96, however, notes that, in the late 1960s, James McHugh of the NRLC “encouraged bishops to recruit doctors and lawyers to lead the right-to-life committees. This strategy seemed natural because, up to that point, organizations on both sides of the debate had consisted disproportionately of members of the medical and legal professions… By 1968, this was beginning to change, but the language of public health still dominated the debates on this topic in professional medical societies and state legislatures.”

[78] Mary Ziegler, “The Framing of a Right to Choose: Roe v. Wade and the Changing Debate on Abortion Law,” Law and History Review 27, no. 2 (2009), 281-330 notes that, “[b]efore Roe, supporters of population control, now not associated with pro-choice advocacy, were willing to support abortion reform as a population control measure, designed to cut welfare expenses, reduce pollution, or cut illegitimacy rates. In turn, in spite of the numerous, non-eugenic arguments associated with population control, some politicians and members of the public remained convinced that population control reformers harbored racist or eugenic motives. Abortion opponents and pro-life activists responded by emphasizing not only the rights of fetuses but also the threat that population control reforms might pose to African-Americans and disabled Americans. Partly for this reason, some African-American leaders and members of the public who supported abortion after Roe opposed abortion reform when, before the decision, abortion was thought of as a method of population control.”

Ziegler describes on pages 291-6 the increased role played by groups including the Population Council and Zero Population Growth, Incorporated (ZPG) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Involvement included “The Report of the Commission on Population Control and the American Future (the Rockefeller Report)” from Population Council, “which endorsed a broad variety of economic, social, and educational measures, including a call for the repeal of all criminal abortion laws,” as well as campaigning by ZPG activists “for better access to alternative reproductive techniques as a tool to preserve the environment and achieve zero population growth.” Subsequent sections of the article describe how abortion rights and women’s rights groups engaged with this rhetoric. For example, Ziegler notes on page 320 that, “[b]y early 1972, NOW had renamed its abortion task force the ‘Task Force for Reproduction and Its Control and the Development of Population Policy.’ In February of that year, the NOW Board considered partnering with the Ford Foundation on a population control study. In 1972, NOW also began working closely with ZPG on the campaign for abortion reform.”

[79] Paul VI, “Encyclical letter, Humanae Vitae,” accessed July 16, 2019, http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html.

[80] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 235.

[81] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 239 notes that the message “in that first newsletter did not herald bold proposals as much as define the organization's mission statement: ‘The national office hopes to keep the information moving among the Right-to-Life Committees in the various states,’ which reinforced NRLC's original charge of 1967 that it was little more than an educational clearing house. It claimed that ‘ultimate success’ would come by setting up right-to-life committees, designating a reporter for these pro-life groups who would send information to the national office, and donating money to keep the NRLC financially secure.”

[82] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 539 notes that “[s]mall, independent right-to-life committees had already begun to emerge in various places across the United States as people learned about new legislation in their respective states. They became aware of the NRLC and relied on the national office for direction and information. Taylor continued to provide almost monthly newsletters, keeping the growing number of anti-abortion groups informed on legislation and court action.

“After nearly fifty years, the genesis of the right-to-life movement now can be seen clearly as the effort of ordinary people who established grassroots committees and small groups in the late 1960s. In 1966, Troy, NY, resident Edward Golden, who was in the building trade, became increasingly aware that members of the state assembly wanted to enact a bill to weaken the state's anti-abortion law. The following year he formed a small group to monitor legislation. From that humble start, Golden founded the New York State Right to Life Committee in 1967… Golden contacted the NRLC and soon began receiving material.”

Other descriptions in the article present the foundation of new groups as autonomous decisions by local advocates, although their relationship with the NRLC is not explicitly discussed, so it is unclear whether the group played any role, but the narrative reads as if it did not. Speculatively, as president of Kalamazoo (MI) Right to Life, Karrer may be biased towards emphasizing the independence of local groups.

Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 94 notes that James McHugh of the NRLC “wrote to the nation’s bishops in June 1968 urging each of them to create a state right-to-life committee by September 15, in time for the upcoming legislative season. Many state Catholic conferences failed to meet this tight deadline… Nevertheess, McHugh’s directive shapped the course of the pro-life movement for at least the next five years. The pro-life mmovement would be led by laypeople, with the bishops playing a less public role, and it would be organized primarily at the state level, with the NRLC providing a limited degree of national coordination. While many of the right-to-life organizations engaged in public educational efforts and other activities, they were created for one central purpose: lobbying their state legislatures to defeat all abortion law reform proposals.”

[83] “Fighting the ‘Hurricane Winds’ of Abortion Liberalization: Americans United for Life and the Struggle for Self-Definition before Roe v. Wade,” The Sixties (May 2018), 1-25.

Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 94 adds that, “[t]he NRLC began essentially as an adjunct of McHugh’s office, with a leadership team made up entirely of his personal associates. Its first president was Juan Ryan, a Catholic lawyer and lifelong friend from McHugh’s home state of New Jersey. McHugh’s personal assistant Michale Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old employee of the NCCB, became the NRLC’s executive secretary. The operation had a shoestring budget, so the NRLC had no paid staff in its early years; Taylor and Ryan were volunteers.

[84] Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, 35, citing Malcolm Potts, Peter Diggory, and John Peel, Abortion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

[85] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 95 notes that state level Catholic conferences “provided the seed money and offered occasional financial help along the way [of starting new organizations], although usually not to the extent that the organizations wanted. In North Dakota for instance, the state’s Catholic conference provided a $5,000 startup grant but then required the organization to raise $3,800 on its own almost immediately. Collectively, Catholic bishops provided the NRLC with approximately $25,000 per year until 1973—an amount that did not go very far toward the goal of creating a lobbying presence in all fifty states.”

Williams adds that, “[a]lthough the right-to-life organizations depended on Catholic institutional support… [b]y the early 1970s, many of the state organizations were led by Protestants who felt free to take positions that contradicted official Catholic teaching. And the relationships between organizations and local bishops varied.”

[86] “Discover Birthright,” Birthright International, accessed July 16, 2019, https://birthright.org/learn/.

[87] Laura S. Hussey, “The Pro-Life Pregnancy Help Movement,” APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper, accessed April 9, 2019, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2107990.

[88] See, for example, Michael Alison Chandler, “Antiabortion Centers Offer Sonograms to Further Cause” (September 9, 2006) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/08/AR2006090801967_pf.html and Alice X. Chen, “Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Impeding the Right to Informed Decision Making,” Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender 19 (May 22, 2013), https://web.archive.org/web/20180425183027/http://www.cardozolawandgender.com/uploads/2/7/7/6/2776881/chen_cpcs_final.pdf, 936-7.

[89] Alice X. Chen, “Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Impeding the Right to Informed Decision Making,” Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender 19 (May 22, 2013), https://web.archive.org/web/20180425183027/http://www.cardozolawandgender.com/uploads/2/7/7/6/2776881/chen_cpcs_final.pdf, 935.

[90] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 536 notes that Dennis Horan, a Catholic law professor, “coedited the influential book Abortion and Social Justice (New York, 1972) with pro-life colleague Thomas Hilgers of the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine. Three other scholars also contributed during the early years. Theologian Grisez of Georgetown University wrote an important book, Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments (New York, 1970), which discussed the aspects of the Church's position on abortion through the centuries. In January 1971, Paul Marx, a sociology professor at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, attended the Symposium on Implementation of Therapeutic Abortion in Los Angeles and recorded its sessions. His explosive book The Death Peddlers: War on the Unborn (Collegeville, MN, 1971) was an inside look at the pro-abortion industry. A final contributor was Granfield, professor in the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America, whose The Abortion Decision (Garden City, NY, 1969), was a frequently consulted resource for early anti-abortionists.”

[91] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 27-8 note that, “[b]y one count, in fall 1970 there were five such cases before the Supreme Court, more than 20 in lower federal courts, and many more in the courts of 11 states. By the time of the Wade decision, the Supreme Court could cite precedent based upon 18 state and federal cases.”

[92] Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 377. Garrow adds that the court cited Griswold v. Connecticut and “extensively and explicitly relied upon Zad Leavy’s amicus brief on behalf of the 178 medical school professors and deans.”

[93] Ibid, 335-88.

[94] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 61-2. They add that the “militants” won an internal election over the “moderates.” The militants also supported “calling for ‘days of anger’ in 11 cities” and “a series of national demonstrations on May 8, 1969, to coincide with Mother’s Day,” with “picket lines and sit-ins at many hospitals.”

[95] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 61 describe the group as, “the work of a small cadre of dedicated activists motivated strongly by feminist goals.” They note that dinner speakers included Betty Freidan, a prominent feminist, “Dr. Lester Breslow, president of the American Public Health Association, and Dr. Alan Guttmacher, president of Planned Parenthood - World Federation.” They cite the account of Lawrence Lader, Abortion II: Making the Revolution (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 88-98, describing Lader as “a key figure in [NARAL’s] establishment.” Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 350 notes that Garrett Hardin was a founding member (for a quote from his speeches, see footnote 33).

[96] Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, 37-54.

[97] C. E. Joffe, T. A. Weitz, and C. L. Stacey, “Uneasy allies: pro‐choice physicians, feminist health activists and the struggle for abortion rights” Sociology of Health and Illness 26, no. 6 (September 2004), 775-96. They note that physicians were involved in the abortion rights struggle, such as through the Association for the Study of Abortion and its 1968 conference at Hot Springs, VA. However, “one doctor said at the AMA gathering [in 1970], ‘Legal abortion makes the patient truly the physician: she makes the diagnosis and establishes the therapy.’ Similarly, even physicians deeply committed to legal abortion voiced hesitation about what legal abortion would imply about the role of the physician in this new health service. As Robert Hall said, in a statement that was to prove quite prophetic, ‘When it comes to the doctor, I think he is eventually going to be no more than a technician. This may be humiliating to him. But it is his unavoidable plight if we are to grant women their inherent right to abortion.’ Reflecting these concerns, the AMA resolution that was passed by its House of Delegates contained the statement that doctors should not provide abortions ‘in mere acquiescence to the patient's demand.’

[98] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 71-3.

[99] “Bill to Legalize Abortions Clears Hawaii Legislature,” New York Times (February 25, 1970), https://www.nytimes.com/1970/02/25/archives/bill-to-legalize-abortions-clears-hawaii-legislature-bill-on.html.

[100] See, for example, Mary C. Segers and Timothy A. Byrnes, Abortion Politics in American States (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 4 and “Washington Early-term Abortion, Referendum 20 (1970),” Ballotpedia, accessed July 16, 2019, https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Early-term_Abortion,_Referendum_20_(1970).

[101] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 69.

[102] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 125 notes that, “[t]he Catholic response was surprisingly weak, because Catholics who opposed abortion did not believe that Cook’s bill would become law. Three years earlier, in 1967, Catholics had mounted an all-out campaign to stop an abortion liberalization effort, and they had done the same the following year. In 1970, they did not put up the same fight… [Republican senate majority leader Earl Brydges’] historic support for the Church’s cause and his previous unwillingness to bring abortion bills to the floor had given the bishops the false impression that the senate was more staunchly opposed to abortion than it actually was, and they underestimated the effect that Brydges’ unexpected acquiescence would have on the legislative body over which he presided. As late as March—nearly two months after Brydges’s staff had drafted an abortion legalizaton bill for the senator to introduce—the New York diocesan paper Catholic News continued to describe Brydges as ‘an opponent of loosening the present safeguards on abortion in the state’... the reports on the abortion bill that appeared in the Catholic News only one week before the senate vote on the measure gave no indication that the bishops thought the bill would pass or that they considered the matter an urgent priority. The Catholic News headline ‘Latest Abortion Bill Seen as No Different from Rest’ hardly seemed calculated to alarm the faithful, so it was not surprising that state legislators reproted receiving few letters protesting the bill.” On page 126, Williams describes how the bishops and anti-abortion activists became more active once the bill passed through the state’s Senate, lobbying legislators and organizing demonstrations.

[103] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 125-6 notes that the Republican senate majority leader Earl Brydges “had overestimated the strength of this pro-life coalition [of Republicans and socially conservative Democrats]. Brydges had likely supported abortion law repeal only because he thought that it was too radical to pass; by helping to draft a repeal bill, he thought he could stave off more modest liberalization proposals and preserve New York’s restrictive abortion law while also appearing not to stand in the way of the Republican governor’s effort to liberalize the law. But he had miscalculated. At the last minute, perceiving a wave of support for a bill that he had thought would be viewed as too extreme, he announced his opposition to the measure that he had helped to bring to the floor. Brydges’s eleventh-hour statement came too late. The bill passed in the state senate by a vote of thirty-one to twenty-six.”

[104] Ibid, 126-7. In fact, it had previously been rejected in the assembly by three votes, which Williams refers to as the “result of the pro-life lobbying.” Nevertheless, the bill was reintroduced the following week through “a point of parliamentary procedure.”

[105] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 129 notes that, “[p]art of the problem, New York pro-lifers decided, was that they had relied on the bishops to lobby for their cause instead of leading the campaign themselves. New York had several pro-life groups, but they were primarily educational or letter-writing organizations that lacked political influence. Edward Golden now recognized his mistake. ‘We realized we’d been steamrollered,’ he said. ‘The people who had been conducting the campaign in favor of abortion had done their work in the corridors of the Legislature, and we hadn’t.’ Golden decided that he and other pro-lifers needed to ‘roll up our sleeves and really become political.’ It might already be too late for that strategy, it seemed.”

[106] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 142-3 notes that, “[p]ro-lifers had long warned that the abortion liberalization movement would soon lead to abortion on demand, but before the 1970s, proponents of abortion law liberalization had dismissed their concerns. After the legalization of elective abortion in New York, Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington, that was no longer possible… Seizing on this moment of public discomfort, pro-lifers regrouped and succeeded in blocking new proposals for abortion legalization in several states in the spring of 1971. In Wyoming, Indiana, and Illinois, they succeeded in getting abortion law repeal bills killed in committee. In Colorado and Montana, they defeated abortion law repeal bills on the House or Senate floor. One of their most striking successes occurred in Mississippi, where a state right-to-life organization orchestrated a letter-writing campaign that flooded state legislators’ mailboxes with petitions against an abortion law repeal bill. When pro-lifers brought a coalition of hundreds of people, including not only Catholics but also Baptists and Jews, to speak against the abortion bill, the committee voted eleven to two to kill it. Altogether, at least twenty-five state legislature took up consideration of permissive abortion legislation in the spring of 1971, and pro-lifers succeeded in defeating every one of those bills.”

[107] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 144 notes that, “[i]n the wake of the legalization of elective abortion, many people decided to join the pro-life cause for the first time, particularly in New York, now the nation’s leading supplier of legal abortons. Prior to 1970, the state right-to-life organization that Edward Golden chaired was small and mostly ineffective; the Catholic Church in the state, rather than grassroots right-to-life organizations, was forced to take the lead in lobbying Albany when the legislature had debated abortion legalization. But immediately after New York passed its abortion law, Golden’s Right to Life Committee began growing exponentially. By the spring of 1972, the committee had fifty county chapters and at least 200,000 members.” Williams also notes on page 194 that Al Fortman, the president of the North Dakota Right to Life Association, who led anti-abortion resistance to proposed reform in that state in 1972, “had been sympathetic to some therapeutic abortion reform laws in the late 1960s, but after unrestricted first- and second-trimester abortions became legal in New York and several other states, he changed his mind.”

[108] Ibid, 175-7. Williams notes that “[t]he assembly passed the repeal bill by a vote of seventy-nine to sixty-eight; the senate likewise adopted it by a vote of thirty to twenty-seven. As expected, the governor vetoed the measure… Several legislators who had voted in favor of abortion legalization in 1970 had switched their votes in 1972.” Of course, the impact of the various anti-abortion tactics used, including mailings and marches, is unclear.

[109] David Karol, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 58. The author of this report has not checked Karol’s claim that this was the first such legislation to be proposed, but he has not come across any earlier examples.

[110] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 54-6. The AMA’s Board of Trustees recommended that its delegates “establish a policy on abortion that would permit the decision to interrupt pregnancy to be made by the woman and her physician. However, no physician should be required to perform an abortion and no hospital should be required to admit a patient for abortion.” On 53-8, they note that in 1967 and 1968, the AMA and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists respectively had endorsed the American Law Institute’s model for limited reform of therapeutic abortions.

[111] Linda Greenhouse, Becoming Justice Blackmun (New York: Times Books, 2005), 78.

[112] Flowers, “Fighting the ‘Hurricane Winds,'” 13 notes that “AUL’s approach was different. The group wanted to shape opinion and attitudes, but aimed to evoke a more analytical, cerebral reaction from the public. AUL’s 1972 book Abortion and Social Justice emphasized that it avoided ‘strident, unreasoned polemical’ positions because the authors understood that ‘appeals to the emotions, pro or con’ were no longer sufficient in the abortion debate. They wanted people to ‘know’ what abortion was, and this meant locating it in a social, political, legal, and philosophical context. AUL was less focused on the specifics of the medical procedure. Graphic images of abortion appeared in Abortion and Social Justice, but there were only four pictures, and they came after almost 270 pages of dense legal, medical, and social analysis. The images were supplemental rather than a constitutive part of the argument, in contrast to Willke’s heavy emphasis on the visual. Ultimately, AUL used the professional expertise of its board to help Americans come to a reasoned understanding of the significance of abortion on demand. This focus on education occurred in spite of a newly partisan interest in exploiting abortion as a federal election issue.”

Flowers presents this focus as coming from an optimism that good education could drive legislative change, citing the doctor Joseph Stanton, an AUL member: “I view the main and essential thrust of A.U.L. as educational, a humanitarian and moral presence, doing a job no other group is doing. I have confidence, if we educate America on the issue and the values involved, we will not have to concern A.U.L. with politics or lobbying. Knowledgeable people will activate themselves on this issue.”

[113] Hussey, “The Pro-Life Pregnancy Help Movement,” 27, citing Margaret H. Hartshorn, Foot Soldiers Armed with Love: Heartbeat International's First Forty Years (Virginia Beach, VA: The Donning Company Publishers, 2011).

[114] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 544

[115] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 547. The September poll was carried out by Detroit News and Free Press,  both reported in September that 59 percent of the state’s voters favored the referendum, including the popular Republican governor William G. Milliken.”

[116] Ibid, 547.

Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 191 notes that in November 1972, Voice of the Unborn had more than 10,000 members and spent $200,000 on the campaign.

[117] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 68.

[118] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 547-8 writes that “[i]n June, 56 percent of voters said they intended to vote against the referendum. During 1972 [Albert Fortman, leader of the state’s Right to Life group] traveled the state and helped to establish thirty-nine local right-to-life groups to fight the ballot initiative. The American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod supplied leadership and energized congregations, as did the two Catholic bishops who organized the Catholic vote. During the final stage of the anti-abortion campaign, hundreds of volunteers distributed thousands of brochures. The Knights of Columbus passed out Willke's ‘Life or Death.’ In the end, the referendum was soundly rejected, 77 to 23 percent.”

Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 193 notes that the North Dakota Right to Life Association had, by the end of summer 1972, “30,000 members, a newsletter that reached 150,000 readers, and a campaign war chest of $100,000—an impressive feat in a state whose population barely exceeded 600,000.”

[119] William B. Prendergast, The Catholic Voter in American Politics: The Passing of the Democratic Monolith (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999), 161. On pages 161-2, Prendergast notes that several examples of Richard Nixon demonstrating an anti-abortion stance, including that “On 5 May [1972] the president rejected his commission’s proposals [those of the Commission on Population Growth and America’s Future] declaring abortion ‘an unacceptable means of population control,’” a position that echoed the Catholic bishops who denounced the report on 13th April.

On page 162, he notes that “Whereas Republican spokesmen labeled McGovern the candidate of abortion (as well as acid and amnesty), the Democratic strategy was to keep abortion out of the campaign. Exercising their strong control of the Democratic National Convention, the McGovern forces mustered 58 percent of the delegates to vote down a motion to insert in the platform an endorsement of unrestricted abortion. During the campaign, when questioned or attacked on abortion, McGovern asserted that its regulation should be left in the hands of the states—the same position (he insisted) that Nixon held… But McGovern, unlike Nixon, made no effort by word or gesture to associate himself with the position of the bishops on abortion.”

[120] See the paragraph above beginning “That same year, the National Right to Life Committee…”

[121] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 548-57, especially 552.

[122] David Karol, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 58. Based on these two examples, Karol argues that “leadership of the struggle for liberalization of abortion laws passed from doctors to feminists in the early 1970s. These activists were not satisfied with a gradual state-level reform process in which the professional prerogatives of physicians — as opposed to the reproductive rights of women — were expanded.” Karol notes, however, that “The Democratic presidential nominee that year, Senator George McGovern (D-SD), held to a ‘states’ rights’ position on abortion and blocked the feminists’ proposed pro-choice plank... Despite rejecting the feminists’ plank, McGovern was still tarred as the candidate of ‘acid, amnesty and abortion.’”

[123] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 24, and Matthew E. Wetstein, Abortion Rates in the United States: The Influence of Opinion and Policy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996).

[124] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 544 notes that, “[f]or example, the Montana house rejected a bill (95 to 5) that would have repealed the state's anti-abortion law.” See also the paragraphs above beginning “A poll in September 1972…” and “In the same month, voters…”

[125] Ted Joyce, Ruoding Tan, and Yuxiu Zhang, “Abortion Before & After Roe,” Journal of Health Economics 32, no. 5 (September 2013), 804-15 summarize that they “use unique data on abortions performed in New York State from 1971 to 1975 to demonstrate that women traveled hundreds of miles for a legal abortion before Roe. A 100-mile increase in distance for women who live approximately 183 miles from New York was associated with a decline in abortion rates of 12.2 percent whereas the same change for women who lived 830 miles from New York lowered abortion rates by 3.3 percent. The abortion rates of nonwhites were more sensitive to distance than those of whites. We found a positive and robust association between distance to the nearest abortion provider and teen birth rates but less consistent estimates for other ages. Our results suggest that even if some states lost all abortion providers due to legislative policies, the impact on population measures of birth and abortion rates would be small as most women would travel to states with abortion services.”

[126] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 9. Which countries are being counted in the count of 15 nations that had reformed their laws is unclear; they do not include the UK in this list, despite the passage of the 1967 Abortion Act. France liberalized its law in 1975. Other countries presumably prohibited abortion entirely or permitted it only in limited circumstances, such as after rape or where the mother’s health was at risk.

[127] “Roe v. Wade,” Oyez, accessed July 16, 2019, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1971/70-18.

[128] Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 142 argues that the abortion rights movement appeared to the Supreme Court to have a broader base of support than the anti-abortion movement. Luker lists several national medical organizations that submitted amicus briefs and notes that “the abortion reform advocates appeared to be in large part ‘disinterested’; they belonged to organizations that could not be called ‘single-issue’ groups… Whereas the pro-abortion forces had mustered the support of over twenty ‘disinterested’ organizations, the pro-life forces were able to deliver amicus briefs from only four groups—Americans United for Life, ‘Certain Physicians and Fellows of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists,’ National Right to Life, and LIFE (League for Infants, Fetuses, and the Elderly)—and all four were clearly ‘single-issue’ organizations, concerned exclusively with the abortion issue. The organizer of LIFE claimed that his nationwide group had ‘over a thousand’ members, which hardly compared with the 20,000 members of one California women’s group, or the 300,000 members claimed nationwide by Zero Population Growth [both of which also submitted amicus briefs]. Another incentive for the Court to rule on these cases was the fact that over a dozen states already had liberalized abortion laws with different and often conflicting provisions in them.”

[129] Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate before the Supreme Court's Ruling (New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2010), pages ix-x notes that “the fact that neither women nor fetuses figured very prominently in Roe v. Wade makes it plausible to assume that feminist voices and right-to-life voices were simply missing, both from the arguments presented to the Supreme Court and from the public conversation. In fact, feminist and right-to-life positions were passionately expressed in public debate and in friend-of-the-court briefs filed in Roe. Yet, the Supreme Court issued a decision that appeared mainly responsive to the arguments of the medical community. In page after page, Roe reasoned from medical science, and in its main holding affirmed the autonomy of doctors to act in what they believed to be the best interest of their patients. The organized medical profession, which had spurred the criminalization of abortion a century earlier, had come only lately to view the hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions performed every year as a public health problem of urgent dimensions. The Court responded to these medical voices—which the justices heard through legal briefs and, more informally, through their reading and in their daily lives.”

They note that the justices emphasized “support for abortion’s decriminalization from doctors, the bar, many religious leaders, and the rising tide of public opinion,” perhaps because they were more “Mainstream sources of authority.”

Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, “Before (and after) Roe v. Wade: New questions about backlash,” Yale Law Journal 120 (2010): 2028-87 note that there were public health, environment and population, sexual freedom and feminist framings that shaped the debate.

See also the paragraph beginning “In 1955, Mary Calderone…” above.

[130] “Griswold v. Connecticut,” Oyez, accessed October 4, 2019, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1964/496.

[131] “Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113,” US Supreme Court (1973), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/. Though one such interest was the state’s interest in protecting prenatal life, the justices concluded that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”

[132] “Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179,” US Supreme Court (1973), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/179/.

[133] Daniel K. Williams, “The GOP’s Abortion Strategy: Why Pro-Choice Republicans Became Pro-Life in the 1970s,” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 4 (2011), 523-5. Williams also describes the mixed reactions of others in the Republican party.

[134] For example, W. Barry Garrett, “News Analysis,” Baptist Press (January 1973), accessed April 24, 2019, ttps://docplayer.net/89407224-By-w-barry-garrett-the-texas-decision-in-all-probability-invalidated-si-muar-laws-in-30-other-states.html, notes that “There is no official Southern Baptist postion on abortion, or any other such question. Among 12 million Southern Baptists, there are probably 12 million different opinions. Messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in St. Louis in 1971, adopted a resolution acknowledging differing viewpoints on the question of abortion, and expressing ‘the belief that society has a responsibility to affirm through the laws of the state a high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, in order to protect those who cannot protect themselves.’ The resolution further called on Southern Baptists ‘to work for legislation that wil allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.’”

Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical’s Lament (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 11-12 argues that at the time, “the vast majority of evangelical leaders said virtually nothing about [Roe v. Wade]; many of those who did comment actually applauded the decision,” and cites several other examples of evangelical leaders offering support for abortion in at least some circumstances.

In contrast, the official statement “Abortion 1973,” National Association of Evangelicals (1973), https://www.nae.net/abortion-1973/, noted that “we deplore in the strongest possible terms the decision of the U. S. Supreme Court which has made it legal to terminate a pregnancy for no better reason than personal convenience or sociological considerations. We reaffirm our conviction that abortion on demand for social adjustment or to solve economic problems is morally wrong. At the same time we recognize the necessity for therapeutic abortions to safeguard the health or the life of the mother, as in the case of tubular pregnancies. Other pregnancies, such as those resulting from rape or incest may require deliberate termination, but the decision should be made only after there has been medical, psychological and religious counseling of the most sensitive kind.”

[135] A commonly cited example of this is the statement of one anti-abortion activist, who said that “we felt as though the bottom had been pulled out from under us. It was an incredible thing, I couldn’t believe it… I think we all sort of took a lot of things for granted.” (Cited in Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 66 and elsewhere).

Ziad W. Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 83-4 notes that “Many pro-life activists today remember being shocked, angry, disappointed, or saddened when they first heard of the decisions. Diane, a fifty-nine-year-old in Charleston, sums up the experiences of many when she describes the time she first became interested int eh abortion issue: ‘It was right after the Supreme Court decision, probably right after. I mean, when that happened, I went WHOA! What a change.’”

Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 72-3 adds that anti-abortion activists “were comforted by the political reality that abortion reform efforts at the state level were tapering off by 1972. Between 1967 and 1973, nineteen states liberalized their abortion laws; however, many of these legislative victories were won by a small margin… the reformed laws often did not lead to tangible changes; access to abortion remained problematic especially for poor women. Only four states assured women the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and two of those states were geographically remote—Hawaii and Alaska. Pro-life advocates had good reason to believe that the legalization of elective abortions on a national scale would remain elusive, which is why January 22, 1973, was a devastating day for activists.”

[136] Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists, 84 notes that “Previous scholars have found that Roe v. Wade was a critical catalyst that led people into activism (Luker 1984; Staggenborg 1991). They argue that people such as Diane flocked to the pro-life movement, driven by the shock the Supreme Court decision gave to their moral views and understanding of the world. Only a handful of the activists I spoke with, however, actually became mobilized immediately after the Supreme Court rulings.” Munson notes that 54% of the sample of 82 activists were “not even eighteen years old when Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton were decided, but does not provide the percentage of those who indicated that the legal rulings influenced their involvement in the movement. Given that conceding a large influence of these cases would undermine Munson’s argument, the concession that “a handful” were influenced by this implies that some activists attribute at least some importance to the rulings.

Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 137 notes that “[m]ore of the people we interviewed joined the pro-life movement in 1973 than in any other year, before or since; and almost without exception, they reported that they became mobilized to the cause on the very day the decision was handed down. For many of them, the memories of that day are extraordinarily vivid… The new group of people brought into active participation in the anti-abortion movement by the Supreme Court decision were predominantly women with high school educations (and occasionally some college) who were married, had children, and were not employed outside the home… the median number of children was 3.5 for those [of the interviewees] who joined before 1967 and 4.25 for those who joined between 1967 and 1973. But on the average, the 1973 recruits were a full decade younger than their predecessors and were thus more likely to have small children to care for.” Luker does not mention having taken any measures to ensure that the interviewees were representative of the anti-abortion movement at this time, but pages 249-5 mention several steps that were taken to ensure that they were some of the most active people in the area.

Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 38-9 cites “Elsah Drogin and Theo Stearns, the women who in 1974 founded Catholics United for Life (CUL), a California group focused on picketing abortion clinics” as further examples of “prominent national advocates [who] recall the Court’s intervention as the reason for their mobilization.” Ziegler adds that, “[n]onetheless, consistent with sociologist Ziad Munson’s findings, other leaders who joined the movement after the Roe decision did not describe it as a major factor in their mobilization, citing several further examples of individuals identified through the interviews conducted for the book.

[137] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 548 notes that “Anti-abortion leaders witnessed a new surge of activity. MCCL’s Paul Andreini of the Mayo Clinic described the situation in Minnesota: ‘We have seen here that many people who were marginally committed are now beating a path to our door asking what they can do.’ Twelve new MCCL chapters organized between January and March, and state membership jumped 50 percent in four months. Kristin Luker writes that unlike the first period of pro-life activity when Catholic male professionals dominated the movement, a huge number of married women joined right-to-life groups in the period immediately after Roe: ‘They were known to be devout, traditional women who valued motherhood.’ Luker calls them ‘the housewives’—a term borrowed from pro-lifers. They became the new driving force for the movement, eager for involvement and change.”

Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, 144 notes that “[b]efore 1973 most major cities in California had only one pro-life organization… but most major cities now [i.e. in 1984] have several, and most suburban areas have their own.” Of course, this does not necessarily show that the 1973 legal rulings were the cause of this change

[138] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 207-8.

[139] Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 38 notes that, “the Court’s decision prompted the formation of several new national groups, such as the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life, a lobbying and education group founded by National Review editor J. P. McFadden.”

[140] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 546 and 555. The 1972 conference had larger attendance in turn than the first and second conferences in previous years.

[141] Robert N. Karrer, “The Pro-Life Movement and Its First Years under ‘Roe,’” American Catholic Studies 122, No. 4 (2011), 59.

[142] Brian L. Wilcox, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, and Janet E. O’Keeffe, “Federal Abortion Policy and Politics: 1973 to 1996,” in Linda J. Beckman and S. Marie Harvey (eds.) The New Civil War: The Psychology, Culture, and Politics of Abortion (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998), 4 notes that anti-abortion constitutional amendments “tend to fall into two distinct classes: right-to-life or human life amendments and states’ rights amendments… note that “Some of these amendments have been crafted to allow for certain exceptions to the general ban on abortions (e.g., in cases of rape or incest, to prevent the death of or protect the health of the mother); others allow no exceptions. States’ rights amendments would give states the option of setting their own abortion standard, much as was the case prior to the decision in Roe.

[143] Karrer, “The Pro-Life Movement,” 59-61.

[144] For a list of HLAs 1973-2003, see Human Life Action, “Human Life Amendments: 1973-2003” (2004), https://www.humanlifeaction.org/downloads/sites/default/files/HLAlst7303.pdf. The definition of HLAs seems to vary; the author of this report recalls having seen other sources claiming that there have been smaller numbers of HLAs proposed than this source suggests, but neglected to record these sources at the time.

[145] Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, 210-1.

[146] Nossiff, Before Roe, 149 notes that “Pennsylvania was not alone in passing restrictive abortion laws just one year after Roe. Massachusetts and Missouri did the same. The 1974 Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act, SB 1318, shared many of the provisions of the Missouri act. These included viability regulations that physicians were required to follow and rules governing informed consent (a woman requesting an abortion had to be told the details of the procedure), spousal consent, unless the woman’s life was endangered, and parental permission for an abortion if the woman was a minor. But Pennsylvania significantly expanded restrictions on abortion by prohibiting the public funding of abortions unless the woman’s health or life was in danger—a restriction that proved to be widely popular on the state level in the period after Roe.”

On page 150, Nossiff adds that, “[w]ithin the next five years, the courts ruled on the constitutionality of several of the act’s provisions. In the first case, Planned Parenthood Association v. Fitzpatrick (1975), a district court deemed several provisions of the 1974 Abortion Control Act to be unconstitutional. The court held that spousal- and parental-consent provisions violated women’s rights to privacy, and that the prohibition of public funding for nontherapeutic abortions violated the equal-protection clause. It also struck down Pennsylvania’s definition of viability, which necessitated a standard of care, on the grounds of vagueness. Several provisions, however, were upheld including those regarding licensing, reporting, and medical procedures.”

[147] Scott H. Ainsworth and Thad E. Hall, Abortion Politics in Congress: Strategic Incrementalism and Policy Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 116 and 160-1.

[148] See the paragraph beginning “Polling from before Roe v. Wade” in the section on “Changes to Public Opinion.” For discussion of the effects of the legal ruling and surrounding campaigning on public opinion, see the paragraph beginning “Modelling abortion opinion…” and the subsequent paragraph in the section on “Institutional Reform.”

[149] Cited in Cassidy, “The Right to Life Movement,” 144. Cassidy notes that there was much debate about the specifics of the amendment to be proposed, and how radical it should be.

[150] “History,” Americans United for Life, accessed February 11, 2019, https://aul.org/about/history/. The site also notes that “Horan’s vision was simple: AUL and the movement needed a legal defense fund, an entity to draft laws that would do what was possible to save unborn life, while laying siege to Roe by ensuring that such laws were properly defended in the courts. For several years, Horan and a handful of colleagues did this on nights and weekends, on top of their demanding legal practices. Horan remained AUL’s driving force from 1973 until his untimely death in 1988, and the focus on abortion’s harm to women became central to AUL’s advocacy.”

[151] Susan E. Lawrence, The Poor in Court: The Legal Services Program and Supreme Court Decision Making (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), cited by Lee Epstein, “Interest Group Litigation During the Rehnquist Court Era,” Journal of Law and Politics 9 (1992), 691. For the 15 listed interest groups across different periods, “success rates” of litigation range from 37% to 88% and the number of cases reviewed ranges from 7 (the AUL LDF) to 345 (the US Solicitor General), with the next highest being the American Civil Liberties Union with 140 cases (of which they won 41%).

[152] Ziegler, “The Framing of a Right to Choose,” 283-4 notes that, “Roe was not the only reason for the decline of these arguments in the years between 1973 and 1980. Because some African-Americans identified population control reforms with racism, organizations that favored legalized abortion had reason to set aside population control arguments in order to avoid being accused of racism themselves… But if Roe was not the only reason that the abortion debate changed, it was an important reason. Roe brought rights-based arguments into new prominence and shifted the balance in the debate away from policy-based arguments, including those related to population control. As a consequence, population control was effectively eliminated as an influence on the abortion debate… By minimizing the role of population control in the abortion debate, Roe ultimately changed the way people thought and talked about abortion, and as a result, changed the coalitions on either side of the debate as well.”

[153] Ziegler, “The Framing of a Right to Choose,” 300-1 notes that, “[a]fter Roe, when population control rhetoric no longer played a significant role in the abortion debate, [The Population Council] distanced itself from abortion discussion. Thus, when Christopher Tietze began a 1975 study about the rate of legal abortions and abortion-related deaths, the Council no longer sponsored his research, and he instead pursued funding from Planned Parenthood’s Guttmacher Institute. Between 1974 and 1978, after Third World leaders at the 1974 UN Conference criticized population control initiatives, the Council also publicized domestic research on the safety of oral contraception rather than international programs or abortion studies.” Ziegler adds that, “[a]s population control arguments stopped playing a role in the abortion debate, ZPG [Zero Population Growth, Incorporated] stopped focusing exclusively on protecting abortion rights or even on access to contraception. In the summer of 1974, ZPG Executive Director, Robert Dennis, spoke publicly about a proposal by the organization to restrict legal immigration by 90 percent… This new emphasis was evident even into the late 1970s as ZPG’s involvement in pro-reform advocacy continued to decline. Instead of lobbying for funding for abortions or the appointment of pro-choice judges, ZPG joined the 1977 call for federally-funded ‘alternatives’ to abortion and continued arguing that immigration policy was a central part of population control.”

[154] Ziegler, “The Framing of a Right to Choose,” 308-12 shows that Planned Parenthood continued to use population control arguments for several years after Roe; the shift appears to have occurred gradually, in response to various events in the 1970s. There was at least some explicit effort to focus on the arguments used in Roe. For example, “[i]n a confidential memorandum, Robin Elliott, one of the [Planned Parenthood] conference organizers, summarized the conclusion of the Conference that an effective defense of Roe was central to Planned Parenthood’s ‘program gains’ in abortion and even contraception… Elliott summarized the concern of Planned Parenthood operatives that opponents of the Roe decision had successfully called into ‘question… Planned Parenthood’s credibility in its reference to a population problem’ (Memorandum, 4). Those present at the conference saw Planned Parenthood’s support for population control as a vulnerability, because pro-life organizers had successfully ‘sought to exploit to their own advantages the fears of minorities” (Memorandum, 4). Elliott suggested that abortion reform advocates adopt a new strategy involving “the reaffirmation of commitment to freedom of choice in parenthood’ (Memorandum, 4).”

Likewise, change at NARAL was not immediate; Ziegler notes on page 315 that, “NARAL and Zero Population Growth persisted throughout 1973 in sharing fact sheets, press advice, newsletters, and membership lists. In 1974, [Lawrence Lader, a leader at NARAL] continued building alliances with population control organizations and sought a place for NARAL speakers at the UN World Population Conference.” Following this, however, as shown on pages 315-7, some members of NARAL called for more explicit focus on the arguments in Roe; the organization’s focus seems to have shifted after one of those advancing this position, Sarah Weddington, became head of NARAL.

Ziegler argues on pages 320-1 that for the National Organization for Women, “[e]ven after the decision of Roe v. Wade, while Heide remained President, NOW leaders continued to combine rights-based and population control arguments…  The true rhetorical shift, however, occurred when the leadership of NOW changed. In 1974, Karen DeCrow, another feminist attorney, became president of NOW, and shortly after called on the organization to clarify its stand on abortion…  because of DeCrow’s influence, the organization had developed a formal debating handbook by 1974, recommending that activists emphasize primarily rights-based arguments… [such as] ‘Don’t argue the moral rights or wrongs of abortion… instead stress that everyone has the right to make their own moral decision for or against abortion.’”

[155] Ziegler, “The Framing of a Right to Choose,” 324 notes that, “[r]ights-based anti-abortion arguments also changed in 1973. Many antiabortion activists began spending time refuting the reasoning of Roe v. Wade itself. In a flurry of letters to Congress, individuals and organizations criticized the decision’s holding that the fetus was not a person and that women had a right to abortion. One of the letters sent to NARAL in the wake of the decision is representative of new anti-abortion arguments: ‘Every human being gets his or her right to live, not from the Supreme Court, but from God… Where does the woman get her so-called ‘right’ to destroy another human life? In short, she does not have that right.’”

[156] Mary Ziegler, “Beyond backlash: Legal history, polarization, and Roe v. Wade,” Washington and Lee Law Review 71 (2014), 974-5 summarizes that, “[a]bortion opponents argued that the state could ban abortion only if it conferred rights on women after pregnancy. For this reason, activists campaigned for reforms that created new protections for caretakers, arguing that reproductive choice lost meaning if the state did not support women raising children. Part IV [of Ziegler‘s article] examines pro-choice conversations about medical experimentation, fetal life, and informed consent. In the midst of scandals concerning medical exploitation and sterilization abuse, some in the pro-choice movement worked to carve out a space for fetal rights that did not conflict with Roe.”

These shifts are detailed in the article. For example, on page 989, Ziegler notes that Marjory Mecklenberg, a long-time anti-abortion activist and one of the leaders of American Citizens Concerned for Life, “formulated a new understanding of reproductive choice. The Supreme Court had set forth an idea of choice that mostly involved liberty from the state. Mecklenburg instead saw choice as inextricably linked to the idea of welfare rights. If the state recognized a right to choose to bear a child, as Mecklenburg argued, then the state had to guarantee women the means to raise that child. She asked Congress to support child care, sex education, family planning, and programs to encourage young girls to continue to pursue education in the setting of their choice.” The direct role that Roe played in encouraging these shifts is, of course, difficult to assess. Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 36-7 describes schisms in the movement, citing Mecklenberg as an example of an anti-abortion activist supporting both contraception and women’s equality, while other activists disagreed with both of these positions.

Ziegler (2014) concludes on page 1017 that, “for almost a decade after the decision, abortion politics little resembled the bitter, dysfunctional debate with which so many have found fault.” Nevertheless, Ziegler suggests on page 975 that this “world of possible compromise gave way to one of greater ideological entrenchment” and argues that this was encouraged by “ongoing political party realignment, the emergence of the New Right and the Religious Right in American politics, and the ascendancy of incrementalist litigators in the pro-life movement.”

Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 157-86 provides further detail on how Roe, as summarized on pages xxiii-xxiv, functioned “as a canvas onto which activists could project different strategic aims. Those on both sides reinterpreted Roe as a way of winning new members, raising funds, remaking public views of what the Court had said, and preparing the ground for later law reform efforts. Competing groups drew on one another’s understandings of the decision, ultimately settling on the version that predominates today—Roe protects a woman’s right to choose.”

[157] “History of the March for Life,” March for Life Education and Defense Fund, accessed July 17, 2019, https://marchforlife.org/history-of-the-march-for-life/ and Karrer, “The Pro-Life Movement,” 57-8.

[158] Carol J. C. Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America: Meaning, Motivation, and Direct Action (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1. On pages 31-2, Maxwell recounts the narrative explained by activist interviewees in St. Louis (in Maxwell’s words): “In August 1975 the first significant pro-life sit-in took place in Maryland near Washington D.C.; the second followed on July 4, 1976 in Washington, D.C., and a third sit-in occurred early that fall in Cleveland. By then Kevin [Maxwell’s pseudonym for the activist whose ideas and organizing helped to first establish the use of sit-ins] had returned to join his friends. Together they formed an organization [the Pro-Life Nonviolent Action Project (PLNAP)] that conducted 1 or 2 sit-ins in each of 25 states throughout 1977 and 1978; sit-ins occurred more frequently in the Washington, D.C. area, St. Louis, and St. Paul, Minnesota during that period… [PLNAP] ‘worked as systematically as possible on a small budget to promote sit-ins across the country.’ They networked through existing pro-life organizations (such as the National Right to Life Committee and the National Youth Coalition) to promote their message.”

[159] Michael W. Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 64 notes that in 1974, a “California hippie” named Theo Stearns and Stearns’ associates “formed a pro-life organization called Catholics United for Life.” In an interview with Cuneo, Stearns said that the NRLC “hated” the CUL because “we went to abortion clinics and prayed the rosary.” On page 65, Cuneo notes that, “[i]n 1978 the group moved to an abandoned mine near Coarsegold, California, and began demonstrating at an abortion clinic in Fresno. After just several weeks, however, they put away their placards and bullhorns and started a ministry that has since become known within pro-life circles as sidewalk counseling.”

In a section entitlted “The Rise of Street Protest,” on pages 67-70, Cuneo focuses on the foundation of the Pro-Life Action League from 1980.

[160] For example, Faye Ginsburg, “Saving America’s Souls: Operation Rescue’s Crusade Against Abortion,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.) Fundamentalism and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 561-3 mentions acts of violence from 1977 and the foundation of the Pro-Life Action League in 1980 and Operation Rescue in 1988, but no sit-ins or grassroots protests in the 1970s.

[161] Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, 81-92.

[162] Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 161.

[163] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 75. Emma Green, “Why Democrats Ditched the Hyde Amendment” (June 14, 2019), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/democrats-hyde-amendment-history/591646/ suggests that Ford had initially tried to veto the whole bill for financial reasons; that is, presumably, regardless of the Hyde Amendment.

[164] Planned Parenthood, “Hyde Amendment,” accessed February 11, 2019, https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/hyde-amendment notes that, “[t]he Hyde Amendment bans using federal Medicaid to cover almost all abortions but does not limit a state’s ability to use its own funds to cover abortion. As of 2016, 17 states use their own funds to extend abortion coverage to low-income women enrolled in Medicaid (although some of these states still make it difficult to access). An additional 6 states extend abortion coverage under specific exceptions, such as when a woman’s health is at risk. That leaves more than half the country abiding by the Hyde Amendment. Notably, South Dakota’s Medicaid program goes even further than Hyde.”

[165] Ainsworth and Hall, Abortion Politics in Congress, 161-2. The proportion of abortion bills introduced into Congress that were considered by the appropriations committee increased over time, from 11% in 1973-84 to 22% in 1985-92 to 29% in 1993-2004. They note that the restricted 1978 bills were “the Labor-HEW appropriations bill, the Department of Defense appropriations bill, and legislation related to the Peace Corps.”

[166] Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Encyclopedia of Women’s History in America (New York: Infobase Publishing, May 2014; first published 1996), 203.

[167] Nossiff, Before Roe, 151. Nossiff adds that this latter point “was significant, because it signaled the Supreme Court’s later willingness to allow states to enact other restrictions on first-trimester abortions, such as prohibiting public funding of nontherapeutic abortions (Beal v. Doe and Maher v. Roe) and allowing states to limit the kinds of abortions poor women could obtain in public hospitals (Poelker v. Doe). These decisions were without regard to the trimester framework, which had previously been understood to prohibit first-trimester restrictions, with the exception of licensing requirements for medical workers and facilities.”

[168] Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 170-1. Nevertheless, Prendergast notes that the NCCB did not express unconditional support for Ford, emphasizing the importance of multiple social issues.

[169] Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 170-1 adds that “The platforms of the major parties took contrasting stands on proposals to amend the Constitution to reverse the decision in Roe v. Wade. The Democratic Party declared ‘undesirable’ any attempt to enact an amendment of this sort. The Republican platform was less abrupt. It agonized over the ‘difficult and controversial’ question of abortion, noted a lack of consensus within the party on the Supreme Court’s decision, which it said permitted ‘abortion on demand,’ and urged continuation of ‘the public dialogue on abortion.’ It ended its contribution to the dialogue, however, with an expression of support for ‘those who seek… a constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.’

David Karol, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 64-6 notes that “In Congress the polarization on abortion was not yet striking... when the Senate voted on a motion to table an anti-abortion constitutional amendment on April 28, 1976, Democratic senators split 33 to 23 to kill the pro-life proposal while Republicans voted 20 to 16 against tabling the measure.”

[170] David Karol, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 64-6 notes that Ford “did not even in principle favor a national ban on abortions. Yet he did support an amendment to the Constitution that would overturn Roe, which he said ‘goes too far,’ and favored returning the issue to the states. Ford also opposed federal funding on abortions... Carter coupled his support for the continued legality of abortion with unequivocal statements that the practice was 'wrong,' and — unlike later Democratic presidential nominees — he opposed federally funded abortions.”

Andrew R. Flint and Joy Porter, “Jimmy Carter: The Re-emergence of Faith-Based Politics and the Abortion Rights Issue," Presidential Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2005), 39 note that “the president made clear in 1977 his support of the Hyde Amendment... Carter was concerned that the Hyde Amendment’s regulations be strictly enforced so that women were not able to use the rape and incest exemption to obtain an abortion deceitfully. At Carter’s behest, Califano was indeed strict in his implementation of the amendment. Jaffe, Lindheim, and Lee (1981, 59) bemoaned the fact that under Califano’s leadership, “Indifference to and avoidance of the implications of legalization of a critical, widely sought health service were replaced by open hostility on the part of the pre-eminent public health official and agency in the United States.”

[171] Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown, Religion and politics in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), paragraph 14.25 notes that “Several local movements that developed during the social ferment and upheaval of the 1970s facilitated the return of evangelicals to organized political action, manifested in what was originally labeled the New Christian Right. Each campaign was led by evangelical Protestants who rallied their coreligionists strongly to the defense of traditional cultural and social values. The threat in West Virginia was a new set of textbooks denounced as ‘disrespectful of authority and religion, destructive of social and cultural values, obscene, pornographic, unpatriotic, or in violation of individual and familial rights of privacy.’ A referendum in Dade County, Florida, overturned an ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing, employment, and public accommodations; the leading opponents, organized in Save Our Children, preyed on concerns about child molestation if private and religious schools were required to employ homosexuals. The proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, approved by Congress early in 1972, was denied ratification by the required three-fourths of American states due largely to efforts by groups and movements drawn disproportionately from evangelical Protestantism that feared t threatened women’s traditional values… These movements represented a sea change in the thinking of evangelical Protestants, a ‘coming out’ almost as dramatic as the political awakenings of feminists and homosexuals that had triggered it.”

[172] Andrew R. Flint and Joy Porter, “Jimmy Carter: The Re-emergence of Faith-Based Politics and the Abortion Rights Issue," Presidential Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2005), 31. They add that “Carter’s 1976 electoral campaign was not based on specific issues or, given his status as a political outsider, even on partisan loyalty. As Skowronek puts it, it was an “autobiographical campaign” (1993, 374). A vote for Carter was not a vote for the agenda of the Democratic Party; it was a vote for who Carter was and what he personally represented. What he was, was a man of Christian faith whose public pronouncements reverberated with Biblical undertones. And Jimmy Carter was not just any Christian. According to Tom Wolfe (1983, 271), he was a member of the “Missionary lecternpounding Amen ten-finder C-major-chord Sister-Martha at the Yamaha-keyboard loblolly piney-woods Baptist faith in which the members of the congregation stand up and ‘give witness’ and ‘share it, Brother’ and ‘share it, Sister’ and ‘praise God’ during the service.” Carter actively identified himself with “born-again” evangelicalism.”

On page 32, they claim that “Unsurprisingly, his candidacy inspired the evangelical community. ‘Surely the Lord sent Jimmy Carter,” said Daddy King [Martin Luther King Sr.] to the Democratic Party convention in 1976 “to come on out and bring America back where she belongs.’”

[173] For more evidence of his assurances of the importance of his faith to his politics, see Andrew R. Flint and Joy Porter, “Jimmy Carter: The Re-emergence of Faith-Based Politics and the Abortion Rights Issue," Presidential Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2005), 32 and 34-5. On his difference from the politics of most evangelicals, the authors summarize on page 35 that “In practice, however, Christian conservatives quickly became disillusioned with the Carter presidency. His advocacy of the Equal Rights Amendment and gay rights, and his failure to support mandatory prayer in public schools or to move to ban abortion were all anathema to their religious principles. On the international stage, his efforts toward arms control and the Panama Canal Treaty smacked of misplaced idealism at best and unholy accommodation with godless Communism at worst. As early as 1978, evangelicals began to feel disillusionment with the Carter White House. By 1979, they had coalesced as the New Religious or Christian Right and were actively campaigning for his removal from office.”

[174] Ibid, 42-7. They note, for example, that Religious Liaison Reverend Maddox repeatedly advised Carter to reach out to the conservative Christian leaders, but he did not meet them until January 22, 1980. Shortly afterwards, “Jerry Falwell, the founder of the largest of the Christian Right organizations, the Moral Majority, publicly attacked Carter for his stance on gay rights and accused him of attempting to woo homosexual voters by giving public approval of their ‘sinful’ lifestyle.” This was after these leaders had held meetings with several Republican candidates. They add that “Their bitterness, Maddox recalled, led Christian conservative leaders to denounce Carter ‘as the anti-Christ,’ and when newspaper columnist Bob Novak attended a conference of conservative preachers in 1979, he observed minister after minister declaring ‘I was part of Carter’s team in 1976. I delivered my congregation for Carter. I urged them all to vote for Carter because I thought he was a moral individual. I found out otherwise, and I’m angry’... The conservative evangelical community, now politically activated as the Christian Right, instead turned to Ronald Reagan in 1980, a candidate who more carefully articulated their agenda. This was despite the fact that Reagan’s nominal religious credentials bore no comparison to Carter’s genuine piety. Reagan did not regularly attend religious services.”

[175] Karrer, “The Pro-Life Movement,” 64.

[176] Cassidy, “The Right to Life Movement,” 149.

[177] Karrer, “The Pro-Life Movement,” 67-9.

[178] “Convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution,” Wikipedia, last edited July 10, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution.

[179] Karrer, “The Pro-Life Movement,” 67-9.

[180] Karrer, “The Pro-Life Movement,” 70 notes that “In 1977, violence erupted at abortion facilities across the country. On February 23, a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota, was vandalized when an intruder poured a flammable liquid and ignited it, causing an estimated $250,000 worth of damage. In August 1977, a bottle of gasoline was thrown through a window at a clinic in Omaha. The largest act, a fire that destroyed a clinic in Cleveland, occurred on February 15, 1978. Anti-abortion groups condemned the reoccurring violence.”

[181] See the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents,” which uses data from Mireille Jacobson and Heather Royer, “Aftershocks: The Impact of Clinic Violence on Abortion Services,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3, no. 1 (January 2011), 194-5. They note that “Data are from the ATF, the NAF, refuseandresist.org, and LexisNexis searches.”

[182] Ibid.

[183] For discussion of whether other anti-abortion activists endorse or reject such violence, see Carol Mason, “From Protest to Retribution: The Guerilla Politics of Pro-Life Violence,” in Kenton Worcester, Sally Avery Bermanzohn, and Mark Ungar (eds.) Violence and Politics: Globalization’s Paradox (New York: Routledge, 2002), 127-45.

Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 106-8 quotes several leaders of anti-abortion groups disavowing violent tactics.

[184] Karrer, “The Pro-Life Movement,” 69.

[185] “American Life League Incorporated vs. ACLU,” FindLaw, accessed June 19, 2019, https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-4th-circuit/1054994.html, shows a legal case involving ALL’s use of clinic protests. “About Us,” American Life League’s STOPP International, accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.stopp.org/article.php?id=5247 notes that “STOPP endorses all nonviolent activity which is in accord with the laws of God. We support the no-exception legislation position of American Life League. We believe all these activities are necessary and must be joined with an all-out assault on the failed sex ed programs of Planned Parenthood if we are to restore the family to its true place and protect our children.” The claims at “American Life League,” Wikipedia, last edited May 20, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Life_League that “ALL helped to establish the ‘rescue movement’, which utilizes several tactics against abortion and related services” and that “These tactics, adopted and popularized by ALL” are uncited.

Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 48-9 describes that in the early 1980s, NRLC supported the ocal direct action activists in St. Louis. However, “[i]n the mid-1980s ALL endorsed direct action and NRLC disassociated itself from it. Perhaps NRLC officials saw the increasingly aggressive tactics of direct activists as too alien to their own focus (which centered on legal action to curtail abortion practice) or too dangerous. They might also have foreseen the exposure the leaders of such media-rich activities might capture as a challenge to their own positions as spokesmen for the pro-life movement. NRLC reversed its previous policy and position, and expunged all mention of sit-ins from their mass communications... ALL recognized anyone who donate to their organization as a supporter and so had a large ‘subscription’ base, but lacked NRLC’s complex grassroots structure. Consequently, ALL did not replace the speaking and networking opportunities formerly available to Dylan [a prominent St. Louis activist] through NRLC.”

[186] Jacoby, Souls, Bodies, Spirits, 71-4.

[187] Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown, Religion and politics in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), paragraph 14.30 notes that these organizations “shared a common agenda that stressed opposition to abortion, support for voluntary prayer and Bible reading in public schools, the responsibility of government to encourage the ‘traditional family unit,’ maintenance of tax exemption for churches, and endorsement of the Christian school movement. They also targeted social evils like the teaching of evolution, pornography, ‘immoral’ behavior on television, and liquor and drug abuse.” The authors also argue that these changes were driven largely by “secular conservatives” and used “religious rationale” to justify conservative positions, although the evidence for this interpretation seems to be anecdotal.

[188] Jacoby, Souls, Bodies, Spirits, 78 quotes directly A. James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1985), 315: “A study in 1963 showed that only 12 percent of all Protestants regularly watched or listened to religious broadcasts. Gallup polls taken in the late 1970s showed that this figure had more than doubled, and a poll in 1981 found that 27 percent of the national public claimed to have watched more than one religious program in the preceding month. A study in 1984 by Gallup and the Annenberg School of Communications placed the regular audience for religious broadcasts at about 13.3 million.”

[189] Jacoby, Souls, Bodies, Spirits, 80 notes that “By 1976… Programs like ‘The 700 Club’ and ‘The Old Time Gospel Hour’ were mixing politics and proclamation, and politically oriented guests became commonplace, especially on ‘the 700 Club.’” On page 92, Jacoby adds that in 1980, “‘The 700 Club’ began producing a segment of the show called ‘Perspective,’ in which genial host Pat Robertson explained the biblical principles that were to be applied to political leadership. The television evangelists of the Moral Majority uniformly endorsed Reagan over Carter.”

[190] Ibid, 71-4.

[191] Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 201 notes that in 1975, the NRLC “resoundingly defeated” a proposal to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, but “easily” approved a similar proposal in 1977. Ziegler argues that, “[t]he NRLC’s growing hostility to the ERA stemmed from larger changes to the identity of the pro-life movement. In the mid- to late 1970s, it took in new evangelical Protestant members and organizations, including national groups like the Christian Action Council or Christian Voice and smaller local groups like Christians for Life and the Christian Freedom Foundation. The new conservative Protestant antiabortion contributed to a change in the rhetoric of the pro-lfie movement as a whole.”

On pages 202-3, Ziegler describes “a larger New Right campaign to recruit abortion opponents” and “a partnership with the New Right and the Religious Right… As importantly, between 1977 and 1979 new absolutist pro-life groups, funded and supported by Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich [Christian Right activists], began to challenge the NRLC’s dominance in the antiabortion movement. When hardliners took center stage in pro-life politics, mainstream groups like the NRLC moved to the right to outmaneuver their new competitors.”

[192] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 90. They also claimed that they had 11 million members, though this figure seems especially likely to be exaggerated.

[193] Ainsworth and Hall, Abortion Politics in Congress, 160.

Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 77 notes that after the Hyde Amendment, “it was becoming increasingly clear that [Congress] was unwilling to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion. For a couple of years, anti-abortionists tried to enact a constitutional amendment without Congress’ approval by employing Article V and moving the issue to the state level where the movement had experienced more success. Yet by 1978 only thirteen states had called for a convention to amend the Constitution to overturn Roe.”

[194] Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 47-9 describes the involvement of individuals affiliated with American Citizens Concerned for Life and the NRLC in the prosecution for manslaughter in 1975 of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, who had performed an abortion after the fetus had been claimed by observers to have drawn breath outside of the mother’s body. On pages 49-51, Ziegler presents this case as evidence of an increased interest in incrementalism, citing also the efforts to restrict funding for abortions through Congress, such as the Hyde Amendment in 1976. On pages 53, Ziegler quotes “prominent New York activist Ellen McCormack” as saying in 1978 that, “when…. It would not be pragmatically convenient for the Court to support abortion—then the judges may well lean in the other direction.” Pages 54-5 provide evidence that the Christian New Right, which was increasingly becoming associated with the anti-abortion movement, emphasized the importance of the Court’s composition and concerns about its judicial activism.

On pages 58-9, Ziegler notes that John Willke, who had designed the Life or Death pamphlet, “became a champion of incrementalism, arguing for compromise regulations that would restrict abortion without banning it altogether” and cites interviews with an anti-abortion conservative Catholic writer, James Bopp Jr., as providing evidence that from around the turn of the decade, “Bopp saw in incrementalist litigation the seeds of a strategy that could transform the abortion wars. If the movement prioritized statutes that could survive constitutional scrutiny, he believed that pro-lifers could build momentum, motivate new activists, limit access to abortion, and gradually convince the public of the humanity of the unborn.” Nevertheless, other activists resisted this change in strategy, which created “a bitter and lasting schism within the pro-life community.”

[195] Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 182-3. Prendergast adds that The Republican platform included “opposition to government financing of abortion, and support for the appointment of judges committed to the right to life. The Democratic platform opposed an amendment to alter the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion and endorsed government financing of abortions for the poor. President Carter accepted the stand taken in the platform on the constitutional amendment but notified the convention of his personal opposition to federal funding of abortion.”

On pages 195-6 Prendergast notes several inconsistencies and “obfustication” in the Democratic platform’s position on abortion.

[196] Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 260 notes that “The Court’s decision in Roe was written by Justice Blackmun, whom President Nixon appointed to the Supreme Court in 1970, and supported by other of Nixon’s conservative appointees, including Lewis Powell, who during the Court’s deliberations actually advocated lengthening the time period in which women’s abortion decision was protected — from the end of the first trimester to the end of the second. But over the course of the 1970s, prominent Republicans shifted positions on abortion, acting on alignments and framings that were already in evidence by the 1972 election. By the decade’s end, conservatives of the New Right—led by Ronald Reagan, who, in the late 1960s, had signed California’s legislation liberalizing abortion—urged fundamentalist Christians to make common cause with Catholics in opposition to abortion and in support of family values. They attacked Roe as a threat to life and family and as a symbol of judicial overreaching. Republican Party platforms began regularly to support ‘the appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.’”

[197] Noted in Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown, Religion and politics in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), paragraph 14.32. The authors note that as well as its anti-abortion stance, the 1980 Republican platform also included “the legalization of prayer and religious meetings in public schools, and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.”

[198] “Statistics of the Congressional election from official sources for the election of November 6, 2018,” Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives (February 28, 2019), https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/Election-Statistics/, 59.

[199] David Karol, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 82 -3 contains a graph that “shows the correlation between a senator's position on abortion and his or her placement on the general left-right continuum measured by Poole and Rosenthal's (1997) D1 and D2 NOMINATE scores. It reveals that although abortion used to fall between the two dimensions [for example, both measures have a correlation of approximately 0.5 with senators' abortion positions in 1982], now it loads neatly on the first [for example, by 1998, D1’s correlation coefficient around 0.9, whereas D2's correlation coefficient was around 0.15]. A greater proportion of liberal senators once opposed abortion rights, and a higher percentage of conservatives once supported them than is now the case.”

[200] Alesha E. Doan, Opposition & Intimidation: The Abortion Wars & Strategies of Political Harassment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 83.

[201] “S.J.Res.3 - A joint resolution to amend the Constitution to establish legislative authority in Congress and the States with respect to abortion,” 98th US Congress, accessed July 17, 2019, https://www.congress.gov/bill/98th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/00003/all-actions-without-amendments.

[202] At least, this is what is claimed by Brian L. Wilcox, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, and Janet E. O’Keeffe, “Federal Abortion Policy and Politics: 1973 to 1996,” in Linda J. Beckman and S. Marie Harvey (eds.) The New Civil War: The Psychology, Culture, and Politics of Abortion (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998), 4 and the author of this report has not seen evidence of such an amendment being discussed in Congress subsequently.

[203] Ainsworth and Hall, Abortion Politics in Congress, 116 and 160-1. The percentage of all abortion-related proposals that were classified as incremental rose steadily from the 94th Congress (1975-7) to the 105th Congress (1997-9) but declined slightly in the three subsequent Congresses.

The methodology for categorizing proposals as incremental or nonincremental is unclear. On pages 11-12, they note that “the incremental implication of the [partial-birth abortion ban] is noted in the legislative title — not all abortions are banned.” This implies that anything short of an outright ban on abortions is seen to be incremental. However, on pages 108-10, under the subtitle “pro-life nonincremental failures,” they describe several other HLAs, suggesting that other efforts to reverse Roe v. Wade are also categorized as nonincremental. On page 110, they note that “[j]ust as the pro-life advocates have failed in their efforts to enact a pro-life amendment to the Constitution, the pro-choice side has also seen efforts to either codify their views into law or pass a constitutioonal amendment to allow abortions to fall flat.” Given the subtitle of “pro-choice nonincremental failures,” this is presumably how they define abortion rights nonincremental legislation.

[204] For example, Brian L. Wilcox, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, and Janet E. O’Keeffe, “Federal Abortion Policy and Politics: 1973 to 1996,” in Linda J. Beckman and S. Marie Harvey (eds.) The New Civil War: The Psychology, Culture, and Politics of Abortion (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998), 3-24 notes that “Several bills to restrict abortion rights were introduced in the 101st Congress, including a measure by Representative Robert Dornan (R-CA), which would have declared fetuses to be persons, but none of these measures were seriously considered. In the 102nd Congress, measures designed to limit access to abortion include a bill that would have permanently codified existing abortion restrictions using appropriated funds, a bill that would have prohibited abortions from being performed solely because of the gender of the fetus (the Civil Rights of Infants Act), a bill intended to prohibit federal funding for research on RU-486 (the French-developed abortifacient), and bills designed to establish parental notification requirements for any programs receiving federal financial aid. None of the bills received serious attention by either legislative body.”

On page 18, the note an exception: “The 104th Congress also marked the first time an attempt was made to codify language restricting federal funding for abortions as part of the Medicaid statute… Although it is significant that the attempt was made, the measure was vetoed by President Clinton as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1995 in December 1995 and did not become law.”

[205] Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, in footnote 9 on page 205, notes that, “[t]hese include the Pearson Foundation, which was founded in 1969 and planned to increase its 130 clinics to 1,000 in the 1980s; Jerry Falwell’s ‘Save-A-Baby’ program, which began in 1984 with the goal of creating 1,000 centers; and the Christian Action Council, which was founded in 1980 and had 155 centers, with plans for 700 more in 1985.

[206] Jennifer Jefferis, Armed for Life: The Army of God and Anti-Abortion Terror in the United States (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 23.

[207] Linda Greenhouse, “Public Opinion & the Supreme Court: The Puzzling Case of Abortion,” Daedalus 141, no. 4 (2012), 78. Greenhouse adds that previously, in 1980, “the Republican national platform offered only mild criticism of the Court and Roe, declaring that “we recognize differing views on this question among Americans in general—and in our own party.”

[208] “Electoral College Box Scores 1789-1996,” National Archives and Records Administration, US Electoral College, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/scores.html.

[209] Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1987), 264 notes that “On major network television the fetus rose to instant stardom, as The Silent Scream and its impresario, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, were aired at least five different times in one month, and one well-known reporter, holding up a fetus in a jar before 10 million viewers, announced: ‘This thing being aborted, this potential person, sure looks like a baby!’”

[210] Deana A. Rohlinger, Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 60. The definition of “markets” is unclear. Rohlinger adds that the ad in Time magazine catapulted the organization into the national spotlight and hundreds of individuals joined the organization.

[211] Deana A. Rohlinger, Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 60. Citing an interview with an NRLC founder and president, Rohlinger writes that “[i]n 1980, the organization had five employees, several volunteers, and a US$ 400,000 budget. A decade later, the organization employed fifty-five activists and had a US$ 15 million budget.”

[212] Gina Kolata, "Boycott Threat Blocking Sale Of Abortion-Inducing Drug," The New York Times (February 1988), https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/22/us/boycott-threat-blocking-sale-of-abortion-inducing-drug.html.

[213] Catherine Cozzarelli and Brenda Major, “The Impact of Antiabortion Activities on Women Seeking Abortions,” in Linda J. Beckman and S. Marie Harvey (eds.) The New Civil War: The Psychology, Culture, and Politics of Abortion (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998), 83 citing data from the National Abortion Federation.

[214] See the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents.”

[215] Jacqueline Darroch Forrest and Stanley K. Henshaw, “The Harassment of U.S. Abortion Providers,” Family Planning Perspectives 19, no. 1 (1987), 10.

[216] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 85. Doan notes that the term “rescue” was “initially used in Philadelphia in 1985.”

[217] Ginsburg, “Saving America’s Souls,” 567.

[218] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 85-6. See also David Treadwell, “250 Arrested in Anti-Abortion ‘Siege of Atlanta’” (October 5, 1988), https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-10-05-mn-2866-story.html.

[219] See the tab “NAF data” in the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents,” which uses data from “2018 Violence and Disruption Statistics,” National Abortion Federation, accessed July 23, 2019, https://prochoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018-Anti-Abortion-Violence-and-Disruption.pdf.

[220] “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed July 18, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx.

[221] “Statistics of the Congressional election from official sources for the election of November 6, 2018,” Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives (February 28, 2019), https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/Election-Statistics/, 59.

[222] Brian L. Wilcox, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, and Janet E. O’Keeffe, “Federal Abortion Policy and Politics: 1973 to 1996,” in Linda J. Beckman and S. Marie Harvey (eds.) The New Civil War: The Psychology, Culture, and Politics of Abortion (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998), 8, citing K. Victor, “Not praying together,” National Journal (October 1987), 2546-51, notes that White House staff members argued that because there is and always will be disagreement about the appropriateness of legal abortion, the debate must be framed in a different way. They suggested that because there is fairly widespread agreement among the public that abortion is undesirable, even among individuals who support the continued legality of access to abortion services, much like the growing consensus that smoking is undesirable, the administration should choose a policy approach similar to the one taken in the smoking arena. Among the suggestions offered by the staffers were the following: (a) transfer program funds from groups that promote or otherwise support abortions to those that assist with adoptions, (b) end tax deductions for medical expenses associated with abortions, (c) direct the Surgeon General to develop and disseminate pamphlets warning of the medical hazards of abortion, and (d) veto every bill allowing federal dollars to be spent on abortion.

[223] Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 198.

[224] See the point about “Boycotts of specific companies” in the section on “Consumer Action and Individual Behavioral Change.”

[225] “Electoral College Box Scores 1789-1996,” National Archives and Records Administration, US Electoral College, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/scores.html.

[226] See David Karol, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 67-74 for the narrative of his switch.

[227] Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 196 notes that “The Democratic platform of 1984 echoed the 1980 platform’s stand on abortion. By 1988, however, the last vestiges of obfustication were discarded in a platform which affirmed ‘reproductive choice’ to be a ‘fundamental right’ which ‘should be guaranteed regardless of ability to pay.’”

[228] Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox, “Second Coming: The Strategies of the New Christian Right,” Political Science Quarterly 111, no. 2 (1996), 272 note that “By the end of the decade [the 1980s], Reverend Jerry Falwell had disbanded the one-time leading Christian Right organization, his Moral Majority; Reverend Pat Robertson's presidential campaign had failed; and many predicted the imminent demise of the Christian Right in America. There were three primary reasons for the failure of the first wave of the New Christian Right. First, the social movement organizations made no real effort to build at the grassroots and had few active local chapters. Jeffrey Hadden et al. reported that their study revealed no evidence of a functioning grassroots structure and argued that ‘the Moral Majority was primarily an organization for grabbing media attention, built and supported by direct-mail technology.’ Second, religious prejudices made for narrow coalitions, with Moral Majority leaders especially intolerant of Catholics, Pentecostals, and mainline Protestants. Finally, the movement made little attempt to market its message to a broader audience, serving up the same heated rhetoric to the press and public that it used to motivate its activists.”

[229] Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox, “Second Coming: The Strategies of the New Christian Right,” Political Science Quarterly 111, no. 2 (1996), 272-3 note that “In the 1990s, the Christian Right built far more effective organizational structures, far larger and more inclusive coalitions, and began to adopt more pragmatic strategies. Some activists claimed that the movement had matured and that it could now be considered part of the conservative mainstream. Critics charged that the Christian Right was adopting a moderate face to win elections, but that the fundamental agenda remained unchanged. Matthew Moen argues that the new organizations of the Christian Right differed from those that came before in several key ways. First, the organizations of the 1990s abandoned the language of moral crusade in favor of appeals based on the ‘rights talk’ of liberalism. Second, the groups emphasized politics over moral reform and attempted to build political coalitions. In this way, Moen argues, they became more secular. Finally, the new organizations were far more sophisticated than those that went before, primarily because of the influx of a new cadre of skilled leaders.”

[230] Nossiff, Before Roe, 9.

[231] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 92. This was judged by a six to three margin.

[232] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 92 summarizes that “the Supreme Court upheld many of the anti-abortion restrictions and in turn opened the door for future restrictions.” Doan also notes that the decision was won by five-to-four and that “three of the justices in the majority opinion even recommended revisiting the Roe decision.”

Wetstein, Abortion Rates, 22 counts slightly differently, noting that “Borrowing language from previous dissents by O’Connor, Rehnquist maintained in the plurality opinion that the Roe trimester framework was ‘unsound in principle and unworkable in practice.’ Scalia argued that Roe should be abandoned. In all, five of the nine Justices were now questioning the logic of the Roe trimester ruling: Scalia in an outright way; Rehnquist, with White and Kennedy, in a more muted way; and O’Connor because scientific advances were pushing viability forward.”

[233] Christopher B. Wlezien and Malcolm L. Goggin, “The Courts, Interest Groups, and Public Opinion about Abortion,” Political Behavior 15, no. 4 (1993), 392-5. Additionally, abortion rights activities were reported more regularly in the quarter before the decision.

[234] Ibid, 392-5. They use as their dependent variable an unusual measure of public opinion, measured by CBS/New York Times polls in the 1980s: “Although public preferences for legalized abortion appear to have remained basically unchanged through the 1980s, a series of surveys conducted by CBS and the New York Times reflects a very different pattern of opinion during the same period. The exact wording of the abortion item is: ‘Should abortion be legal as it is now, or legal only in such cases as rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother, or should it not be permitted at all?’ The responses to this three-pronged abortion question used in the CBS/New York Times surveys indicate that a significant shift in opinion occurred during the 1980s, whereby the public became more supportive of legalized abortion ‘as it is now.’ At the same time, the public became less supportive of further restrictions on abortion. This shift in opinion is well outside of the bounds of sampling error and occurs somewhat gradually over time.”

The effect of Court activities, but not of “Pro-Life Public Activities” were replicated in an additional check that used “measures of court and interest-group activities... created by content coding the evening television newscasts for all three major networks.”

[235] David Karol, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 67. Karol notes that “the resources of the Republican pro-choice groups pale before those of their Democratic equivalents. By the 1995-1996 cycle the Democratic group EMILY's List was the single biggest PAC in existence, channeling $12,000,000 to pro-choice Democratic female candidates. The GOP equivalent, the WISH List, contributed just over $1,000,000 to pro-choice female Republican candidates in the same period. When we look at the formally nonpartisan lobbies focused on abortion the story is similar. Already by the 1989-1990 campaign cycle, the leading pro-choice groups, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and Planned Parenthood, were giving 89 percent and 98 percent of their contributions, respectively, to Democratic congressional candidates, while the National Right to Life Committee sent 85 percent of their donations to Republicans. Since then these groups' contribution patterns have become even more one-sided.”

[236] Cassidy, “The Right to Life Movement,” 141.

[237] Jack Wilke, “For Better or Worse,” in Teresa R. Wagner (ed.) Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2003), 126. No citations are provided for this data.

[238] Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Encyclopedia of Women's History in America (New York: Infobase Publishing, May 2014; first published 1996), 203.

[239] Michael New, “Analyzing the Effect of State Legislation on the Incidence of Abortion Among Minors” (February 2007), https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/analyzing-the-effect-state-legislation-the-incidence-abortion-among. Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 92 explains the case’s significance similarly, and notes that the case was ruled by five-to-four.

Greenhouse and Siegel, Before Roe v. Wade notes that the judgement states that “[T]he State may enact rules and regulations designed to encourage [a pregnant woman] to know that there are philosophic and social arguments of great weight that can be brought to bear in favor of continuing the pregnancy to full term and that there are procedures and institutions to allow adoption of unwanted children as well as a certain degree of state assistance if the mother chooses to raise the child herself.”

[240] New, “Analyzing the Effect of State Legislation” notes that “pro-life legislation received increased legal support during the 1990s. Although parental involvement laws predated Roe v. Wade, they were struck down in many cases by state and federal courts in the subsequent decades. In the 1990s, this trend halted as conservative jurists appointed by President Ronald Reagan and President George H. W. Bush gave these laws a better chance to withstand judicial scrutiny. In addition, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Supreme Court abandoned its trimester framework in favor of a doctrine of “undue burden,” which gave parental involvement laws and other types of pro-life legislation broader constitutional protection.”

[241] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 92. Doan notes that the numbers of bills introduced “continued to rise:” 245 in 1998, 395 in 2000 and 620 in 2001.

[242] New, “Analyzing the Effect of State Legislation,” citing the NARAL Foundation.

New explains that “Parental involvement rules require minors to notify or to receive consent from one or both parents before receiving an abortion... Informed consent statutes, which received constitutional protection in the Supreme Court's 1992 Casey decision, require women seeking abortions to receive additional information about the abortion procedure, which may include information on fetal development, health risks involved with obtaining an abortion, or public and private sources of support for single mothers… The specifics of informed consent laws vary from state to state. Partial birth bans were upheld in 12 states between 1996 and 2000, although the Supreme Court struck down all partial birth abortion bans in Stenberg v. Carhart in 2000.”

[243] Cozzarelli and Major, “The Impact of Antiabortion Activities,” 87.

[244] Ibid, 87.

[245] Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 75.

[246] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 159. Whereas magazine articles remained fairly stable, between about 550 and 750 in each year between 1995 and 2003, newspaper articles seem to have fluctuated much more, with a peak of over 10,000 in 1992, but varying between about 5,000 and just over 9,000 in the other years between 1989 and 2003.

An endnote explains that “The data presented in figure 8 comes from a search of the major American newspapers and magazines tracked on the Lexis-Nexis database… Abortion-related stories also receive more coverage than reflected in this figure because the count presented in figure 8 does not include local or state newspapers or magazines.”

[247] “Electoral College Box Scores 1789-1996,” National Archives and Records Administration, US Electoral College, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/scores.html.

[248] Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown, Religion and politics in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), paragraphs 15.41 and 15.43 note that Clinton lifted the gag order that had prohibited “federally funded family planning agencies in the United States from even mentioning abortion as an option.” Additionally, Clinton “authorized the resumption of medical research using fetal tissue, restored the authority of overseas military hospitals to perform abortions, permitted importation of a ‘morning-after’ abortion pill (RU-486), and reinstated foreign aid to groups that advocated abortion… Clinton also supported a 1994 law [the FACE Act] that made it a federal crime to intimidate women seeking abortion or to impede their access to clinics. He also vetoed a law prohibiting a rare form of abortion used late in pregnancy. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, restored the gag rule and signed the ‘partial-birth abortion’ ban that Clinton had vetoed. The cycle continued when Barack Obama, Bush’s successor in 2008, repealed the gag order, overturned the ban on federal funding of stem cell research, and endorsed federal funding of Planned Parenthood services. Donald Trump promised to reverse those actions following his election in 2016.”

[249] Tara C. Jatlaoui, Maegan E. Boutot, Michele G. Mandel; Maura K. Whiteman, Angeline Ti, Emily Petersen, and Karen Pazol, “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Surveillance Summaries 67, No. SS13 (2018), 1-45. See also the spreadsheet “Abortions and the abortion ratio by year,” which uses various reports by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

[250] New, “Analyzing the Effect of State Legislation.”

[251] Marshall H. Medoff, “The Impact of Anti-Abortion Activities on State Abortion Rates,” Journal of Socio-Economics 32, no. 3 (2003), 267 claims that “Implicit in the Scheidler decision was the concern by the Court that anti-abortion activities designed to deny women access to abortion services and to shut down abortion clinics may constitute an undue burden on women seeking an abortion.”

[252] “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act,” Wikipedia, last edited January 21, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Access_to_Clinic_Entrances_Act.

[253] See the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents,” which uses data from Feminist Majority Foundation, “2018 National Clinic Violence Survey” (2019), https://www.feminist.org/anti-abortion-violence/images/2018-national-clinic-violence-survey.pdf.

For the 2018 data, they explain that “Severe violence and threats of severe violence included blocking clinic access, invasions, bombings, arson, chemical attacks, stalking, physical violence, gunfire, bomb threats, death threats, arson threats, as well as other incidences of severe violence. The most common types of severe violence in 2018 included blockading of clinic entrances (9.1%), stalking (7.3%), facility invasions (6.8%), death threats (3.2%), and physical violence (3.2%).” However, only “218 providers responded to the survey, out of 729 clinics contacted.” This low response rate may have led to bias and inflation of the figures, although presumably the problem was similar across all years of the survey.

Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 88 explains that FACE not only “essentially criminalized clinic blockades and attached severe monetary penalties to those who violated the law” but “also opened the door for individuals who are seeking or providing reproductive services to seek ‘civil remedies’ against offenders—that is, sue.”

[254] See the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents.”

[255] “2018 Violence and Disruption Statistics,” National Abortion Federation, accessed July 23, 2019, https://prochoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018-Anti-Abortion-Violence-and-Disruption.pdf. However, when the number of arrests in the years 1990-2000 are plotted on a graph (see the tab “NAF data” in the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents”), the decline from the peak in 1991 resembles a smooth logarithmic curve; it is possible that the legal restrictions played little role in encouraging this decline.

[256] See the tab “NAF data” in the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents,” which uses data from “2018 Violence and Disruption Statistics,” National Abortion Federation, accessed July 23, 2019, https://prochoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018-Anti-Abortion-Violence-and-Disruption.pdf.

[257] “Statistics of the Congressional election from official sources for the election of November 6, 2018,” Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives (February 28, 2019), https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/Election-Statistics/, 59.

[258] “Electoral College Box Scores 1789-1996,” National Archives and Records Administration, US Electoral College, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/scores.html and “Electoral College Box Scores 2000-2016,” National Archives and Records Administration, US Electoral College, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/scores2.html.

[259] “This Week,” National Review 46 (December, 1994), 12, cited in Jacoby, Souls, Bodies, Spirits, xi-xii.

[260] Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 208-9, notes that “To the dismay of conservative supporters, the conduct of the campaign deemphasized the issues of their cultural agenda. When Dole addressed such issues, he was so obviously uncomfortable as to sound insincere… Professor James Hitchcock, a leading conservative, raised a question that troubled many in a column syndicated in the Catholic press captioned ‘How Pro-Life is Bob Dole?’ Noting that Dole had turned aside questions on the subject, once claiming to be unfamiliar with the platform language on the issue of abortion, again ignoring the topic in a speech at Jesuit-run St. Louis University, Hitchcock warned that in comparing Dole and Clinton ‘pro-lifers need to think very hard about how preferable Dole really is.’”

On pages 210-11, Prendergast notes that Clinton vetoed bills banning partial-birth abortion, but argues that “the issue of partial birth abortion failed to generate a stronger protest vote from Catholics against the Clinton veto not because of ambiguous signals from clerics but because of the reluctance of Republican candidates to make it a major issue in their campaign.”

[261] “Electoral College Box Scores 1789-1996,” National Archives and Records Administration, US Electoral College, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/scores.html.

[262] Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 210-11.

[263] “Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York,” Oyez, accessed July 17, 2019, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1996/95-1065.

[264] “History,” Americans United for Life, accessed February 11, 2019, https://aul.org/about/history/.

[265] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 92. Doan notes that the numbers of bills introduced “continued to rise:” 245 in 1998, 395 in 2000 and 620 in 2001. Doan adds that “anti-abortion legislation easily outnumbered pro-choice legislation from 1990 to 2001. For example, in 2000, pro-choice supporters introduced 138 bills, whereas pro-life sympathizers introduced 257 in the same year. The following year, 222 bills were pro-choice and 398 were anti-abortion. Out of the measures that were adopted by states during 2001, there were 39 anti-abortion measures, while 27 were pro-choice measures.”

[266] “Stenberg, Attorney General of Nebraska, et. al. v. Carhart,” US Supreme Court (2000), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/530/914/case.pdf, 930.

[267] “Electoral College Box Scores 1789-1996,” National Archives and Records Administration, US Electoral College, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/scores.html and “Electoral College Box Scores 2000-2016,” National Archives and Records Administration, US Electoral College, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/scores2.html, compared to “Statistics of the Congressional election from official sources for the election of November 6, 2018,” Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives (February 28, 2019), https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/Election-Statistics/, 59.

[268] Cheryl Schonardt-Bailey, “The Congressional Debate on Partial-Birth Abortion: Constitutional Gravitas and Moral Passion,” British Journal of Political Science 38, no. 3 (July 2008), 383-410. On page 406, Schonardt-Bailey hypothesizes that “the larger battle was directed at the Supreme Court. By framing a specific type of abortion as morally unacceptable and by laying down the gauntlet to the Supreme Court, Santorum and other sponsors sought to further their incremental assault on abortion in general. Omitting both the exception for a woman’s health and any endorsement of Roe v. Wade were clear signals of the bill’s attempt to further polarize the abortion issue. The reason that the bill’s supporters latched onto the D & X procedure [dilation and extraction procedure, i.e. “partial-birth abortion”] was that it enabled them to frame abortion in a particularly negative and passionate way, and thereby gain leverage in a larger anti-abortion struggle. Within the legislative arena, by framing the D & X procedure as infanticide, proponents gained political points by forcing anti-ban senators into a difficult defensive position.”

[269] “Gonzales v. Carhart,” Oyez, accessed July 25, 2019, https://www.oyez.org/cases/2006/05-380.

In this manner, an anti-abortion president had successfully managed to influence a landmark judicial decision through his choice of appointees. The ruling may also be partially attributable to influence from Americans United for Life. “History,” Americans United for Life, accessed February 11, 2019, https://aul.org/about/history/ notes that “In 2007, Justice Kennedy provided the crucial fifth vote and wrote the Court’s opinion in the landmark case of Gonzales v. Carhart… This decision… resoundingly affirmed AUL’s long-term strategy of pursuing state legislation and legal arguments that focused on protecting women from abortion’s harms. In both Casey and Gonzales, Kennedy was concerned with the impact of abortion on women. Importantly, he based his Gonzales opinion, in large part, on what had become common knowledge: abortion harms women.

[270] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 98.

[271] “The Unborn Victims of Violence Act,” Congressional Research Service (January 2007), https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20070124_RS21550_dffb4d7cfc0a9429c5cd5335999e0716218b5ea7.pdf, 1-2, citing the Center for Reproductive Rights and NARAL Pro-Choice America, summarizes that “organizations that support a woman’s right to choose opposed the act. These organizations asserted that the UVVA [Unborn Victims of Violence Act] was part of a campaign to undermine the right to abortion. They argued that recognition of a fetus or embryo as an entity separate from the pregnant woman could obscure the U.S. Supreme Court’s finding in Roe v. Wade that the word ‘person’ does not include the unborn. If personhood could be established for a fetus or embryo, such entities’ right to life under the Fourteenth Amendment would seem to be guaranteed.”

[272] See “Constitutional Challenges to Unborn Victims (Fetal Homicide) Laws,” National Right to Life (May 2013), https://www.nrlc.org/site/federal/unbornvictims/statechallenges/.

[273] “Statistics of the Congressional election from official sources for the election of November 6, 2018,” Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives (February 28, 2019), https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/Election-Statistics/, 59. Technically, the Democrats did not have a majority in the Senate at first in 2007, since 49 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and 2 senators from “Other Parties” were elected.

[274] “Electoral College Box Scores 2000-2016,” National Archives and Records Administration, US Electoral College, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/scores2.html.

[275] Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown, Religion and politics in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), paragraph 14.127 note that “On the legislative goals central to the GOP agenda—tax cuts, Social Security reform, the war in Iraq, expanded oil drilling—the administration deployed all its ammunition and usually secured legislative approval. By contrast, social conservatives complained, the administration gave only halfhearted efforts to their cherished goals of ending abortion, prohibiting gay marriage, and other such aims. It seemed like a repeat of the Reagan years, with their manifold disappointments amid so much hope.”

[276] “Statistics of the Congressional election from official sources for the election of November 6, 2018,” Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives (February 28, 2019), https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/Election-Statistics/, 59.

[277] Rachel B. Gold and Elizabeth Nash, “Troubling Trend: More States Hostile to Abortion Rights as Middle Ground Shrinks,” Guttmacher Policy Review 15, no. 1 (2012), 16.

Heather D. Boonstra and Elizabeth Nash, “A Surge of State Abortion Restrictions Puts Providers--and the Women They Serve--in the Crosshairs.” Guttmacher Policy Review 17, no. 1 (March 2014) notes that "More state abortion restrictions were enacted in 2011-2013 [205 total] than in the entire previous decade [189 total]."

[278] For discussion of other factors that may have influenced the introduction of anti-abortion legislation, see the sections beginning “For securing desired legislative outcomes…” and “A variety of other advocacy tactics…” in the section on “Strategic Implications.”

[279] Heather D. Boonstra and Elizabeth Nash, “A Surge of State Abortion Restrictions Puts Providers--and the Women They Serve--in the Crosshairs.” Guttmacher Policy Review 17, no. 1 (March 2014).

[280] NARAL Pro-Choice America, “Who Decides? The Status of Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United States” (January 2017), https://www.prochoiceamerica.org/report/2017-decides-status-womens-reproductive-rights-united-states/, 4-5.

[281] Wikipedia, “Fetal heartbeat bill,” last edited July 15, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_heartbeat_bill lists some of the proposed and passed legislation, with heartbeat bills listed for Arkansas, North Dakota, and Wyoming in 2013.

Erik Eckholm, “Anti-Abortion Groups are Split on Legal Tactics,” New York Times (December 2011), https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/health/policy/fetal-heartbeat-bill-splits-anti-abortion-forces.html shows that such legislation was considered in Ohio in 2011.

[282] Anna North, “The ‘Heartbeat’ Bills that could Ban Almost All Abortions, Explained” (April 2019), https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/4/19/18412384/abortion-heartbeat-bill-ohio-2019-georgia-iowa.

[283] “Statistics of the Congressional Election from Official Sources for the Election of November 6, 2018,” Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives (February 28, 2019), https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/Election-Statistics/, 59.

[284] See the tab “NAF data” in the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents,” which uses data from “2018 Violence and Disruption Statistics,” National Abortion Federation, accessed July 23, 2019, https://prochoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018-Anti-Abortion-Violence-and-Disruption.pdf. The authors of the National Abortion Federation report note that “As of mid-November 2015, enhanced technology allowed for an increased ability to uncover Hate Email/Internet Harassment.” It is possible that this technical change could explain the majority of the increase in recorded incidents of harassment in 2015 and 2016, given that the recorded number of incidents was much smaller in 2017 and 2018. No methodological changes that might explain the rise in trespassing or picketing are noted in the 2016, 2017, or 2018 reports, however.

[285] See “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed July 18, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx.

[286] “Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt,” Oyez, accessed July 23, 2019, https://www.oyez.org/cases/2015/15-274.

[287] Philip Bump, “Donald Trump took 5 different positions on abortion in 3 days” (April 2016), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/03/donald-trumps-ever-shifting-positions-on-abortion/.

[288] Dan Mangan, “Trump: I’ll appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade abortion case” (October 2016), https://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/19/trump-ill-appoint-supreme-court-justices-to-overturn-roe-v-wade-abortion-case.html.

[289] The appointments and voting records of the justices is discussed in the “Institutional Reform.”

[290] “Notable speakers” in “March for Life (Washington, D.C.),” Wikipedia, last edited July 3, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_for_Life_(Washington,_D.C.)#Notable_speakers and Bob Fredericks, “Mike Pence makes history by rallying with pro-life marchers” (January 27, 2017), https://nypost.com/2017/01/27/mike-pence-will-make-history-by-rallying-with-pro-life-marchers/.

[291] Kate Scanlon, “‘We are a pro-life Congress’: House votes to make Hyde amendment permanent” (January 2017), https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/24/we-are-a-pro-life-congress-house-votes-to-make-hyde-amendment-permanent. See also Wikipedia, “Hyde Amendment,” last edited March 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Amendment.

[292] “Statistics of the Congressional election from official sources for the election of November 6, 2018,” Office of the Clerk, US House of Representatives (February 28, 2019), https://history.house.gov/Institution/Election-Statistics/Election-Statistics/, 59.

[293] “June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee,” SCOTUSblog, accessed July 22, 2019, https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/june-medical-services-llc-v-gee-2/.

[294] Ritu Prasad, “What’s behind the rise of anti-abortion 'heartbeat bills'?” (April 2019), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47940659.

The individual legislation is not listed, although Wikipedia, “Fetal heartbeat bill,” last edited July 15, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_heartbeat_bill lists some of the proposed and passed legislation; at the time of writing, seventeen states were listed as having proposed heartbeat bills in 2019.

[295] Elizabeth Nash, Olivia Cappello, Sophia Naide, Lizamarie Mohammed, and Zohra Ansari-Thomas, “Radical Attempts to Ban Abortion Dominate State Policy Trends in the First Quarter of 2019” (April 2019), https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2019/04/radical-attempts-ban-abortion-dominate-state-policy-trends-first-quarter-2019. Other types of bans include bans at other gestational ages (such as at 18 or 20 weeks, as opposed to the 6 weeks in the heartbeat bills), “Trigger bans that would automatically make abortion illegal if Roe v. Wade is overturned,” “Reason bans that would prohibit abortion based on fetal characteristics (such as sex, race or disability status); and Method bans that would bar providers from performing a specific type of abortion.”

[296] Wikipedia, “Fetal heartbeat bill,” last edited July 15, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_heartbeat_bill.

[297] See the tab “Gallup overall support” on the spreadsheet “Public opinion data,” which uses data from “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed July 18, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx. Of the measured years, only 1995-6 had a shift in public attitude of the same size (7%).

[298] “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed July 18, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx. The figures for “important” were taken by combining the answers “Candidate must share views” and “One of many important factors” and were contrasted to “Not a major issue” and “No opinion.” The figure fluctuated between 59% and 76%.

[299] See the section on the “Early History of the Movement” above.

[300] See the paragraph beginning “The January 22, 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling enforced…” above.

[301] See the section on “1973-1980: Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion mobilization, and political tactics” above plus the paragraph beginning “In 1982, two separate anti-abortion bills…” and following few paragraphs.

[302] See the paragraph beginning “After this point, proposed legislation…” above.

Ainsworth and Hall, Abortion Politics in Congress, 160 notes also that more constitutional amendments related to abortion were proposed from 1975-80 than were in the combined total of the years 1980-2004, despite Republican presidents in around two-thirds of those years.

Cassidy, “The Right to Life Movement,” 146-7 argues that at this point, advocates shifted focus to securing the nomination of anti-abortion Supreme Court candidates, but only seems to provide evidence of political action to support this before 1983, rather than after that year.

Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) argues that this transition towards incrementalism began earlier than 1983. See footnote 194.

[303] See the section “1980-92: Ronald Reagan, the diversification of anti-abortion tactics, and an increasingly anti-abortion Supreme Court” above, especially the paragraph beginning “The years 1984 and 1985…”

[304] See the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents.”

[305] See footnote 205.

[306] See the paragraph beginning “In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously…” above.

[307] See the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents.”

[308] See the paragraph beginning “The year 1999 saw…” above.

[309] See the paragraph beginning “The Supreme Court decisions of Webster…” above and the section on “2000-present: Republican dominance, incremental legislative successes, and renewed anti-abortion sentiment in the Supreme Court” above.

[310] See the point beginning “For securing desired legislative outcomes…” in the section on “Strategic Implications.”

[311] For further discussion of related issues, see Jamie Harris, “What can the farmed animal movement learn from history?” (May 2019), https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/blog/what-can-the-farmed-animal-movement-learn-from-history.

[312] Susan B. Hansen, “State Implementation of Supreme Court Decisions: Abortion Rates Since Roe v. Wade,” The Journal of Politics 42, no. 2 (May 1980), 376. Hansen notes that “Rates for 1972 through 1973 are reported by states in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1977, Table 93, p. 64, based on surveys of hospitals, clinics, and physicians conducted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Rates for 1976, from similar surveys, are available from the Abortion Surveillance Bureau, “Abortion -Surveillance-United States, 1976,” (Atlanta, GA.: Bureau of Epidemiology, 1978). Each year's figures are for July 1 of that year through June 30 of the following year.”

Some of the delay in rising abortion incidence may have been due to delayed implementation of Roe v. Wade. Garrow, Liberty and Sexuality, 608 notes that “While judicial compliance with Roe and Doe’s mandate was unsurprisingly prompt, actual implementation of the rulings’ tangible commands by American hospitals was generally slow and in many instances simply nonexistent. Both journalistic and professional surveys disclosed that many hospitals, both private and public, were manifesting no desire whatsoever to begin providing abortion services, but in some states, doctors who had already been performing abortions quickly moved to expand the scale of their clinic facilities.”

[313] See the subsections on “1966-73: Legalization of abortion in some states and initial anti-abortion resistance” and “1973-1980: Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion mobilization, and political tactics” in the section on “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement.”

[314] Tara C. Jatlaoui, Maegan E. Boutot, Michele G. Mandel; Maura K. Whiteman, Angeline Ti, Emily Petersen, and Karen Pazol, “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Surveillance Summaries 67, no. SS13 (2018), 1-45 and Sonya B. Gamble, Lilo T. Strauss, Wilda Y. Parker, Douglas A. Cook, Suzanne B. Zane, and Saeed Hamdan, “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2005,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Surveillance Summaries 57, no. SS13 (2008), 1-32.

[315] For discussion of causation, see the point beginning “Disruptive and confrontational tactics…” at the start of the “Strategic Implications” section.

[316] See, for example, footnote 124.

[317] See footnote 144.

[318] Wetstein, Abortion Rates, 32-6

[319] See the paragraphs beginning “In September 1976, the Hyde Amendment…” and “The Hyde Amendment survived…” in the section on “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement.”

[320] See footnote 265.

[321] NARAL Pro-Choice America, “Who Decides? The Status of Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United States” (January 2017), https://www.prochoiceamerica.org/report/2017-decides-status-womens-reproductive-rights-united-states/, 4-5.

[322] Wikipedia, “Fetal heartbeat bill,” last edited July 15, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_heartbeat_bill.

[323] “History,” Americans United for Life, accessed February 11, 2019, https://aul.org/about/history/ argues that “AUL’s emphasis on the states not only offered the most immediate opportunity to save lives — it has also served to bolster pro-life policies, legal precedents, public attitudes, and coalitions that pro-life leaders can build upon in order to enact broader pro-life laws and prepare for the day when Roe’s eventual reversal returns abortion jurisdiction to the states. For example, AUL advised on both the legislation and litigation in the pivotal 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services — which successfully upheld a Missouri law restricting state funding of abortions.”

[324] See the descriptions of their elections and views at various points in the section on “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement.”

[325] See footnote 290.

[326] Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox, “Second Coming: The Strategies of the New Christian Right,” Political Science Quarterly 111, no. 2 (1996), 27 notes, for example, that “GOP lawmakers eagerly seek to be pictured with Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed, Jr., who unveiled the “Contract with the American Family.”

[327] Hartshorn, “Putting It All Together,” 114 notes that “A boon came in the early ‘80s when a small amount of federal dollars was appropriated through Title XX in the Department of Health and Human Services to develop national ‘model prevention programs’ based on abstinence. During the current Bush administration, federal funding has grown for abstinence-until-marriage education through Title V, the welfare reform bill, and SPRANS grants (Special Programs of Regional and National Significance). As a result, tax-funded abstinence-education programs, including at least thirty based within pregnancy centers, have expanded dramatically and have reached more and more schools and communities.”

[328] “Benefits,” Choose Life America Inc., last updated February 27, 2019, http://www.choose-life.org/benefits.php and “Purpose,” Choose Life America Inc., last updated September 11, 2019, http://www.choose-life.org/purpose.php.

[329] “History,” Americans United for Life, accessed February 11, 2019, https://aul.org/about/history/.

[330] “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed July 18, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx. In 1975, 21% of respondents thought that abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. That number was again at 21% by 2019, having fluctuated between 15% and 21%. The percentage of respondents who thought that abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances also remained similar at 54% in 1975 to 53% in 2019, with fluctuations between 48% and 61%. The percentage of respondents who thought that abortion should be legal under any circumstances has risen from 22% to 25%, with fluctuations between 21% and 34%. Combined measures of those who thought that abortion should be legal under any or legal under most circumstances, compared to those who thought that abortion should be legal only in a few or illegal in all circumstances, also show little indication of change, apart from possibly in 2019 compared to 2018 (see the tab “Gallup overall support” on the spreadsheet “Public opinion data”).

[331] See the spreadsheet “Public opinion data,” which uses data from the “General Social Survey 2012 Final Report: Trends in Public Attitudes towards Abortion,” National Opinion Research Center (May 2013), https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/documents/878/download. The General Social Survey data shows that a large majority of the population has consistently supported the right to abortion if there is a strong chance of serious defect for the child, the woman’s health is seriously endangered, or the woman is pregnant as a result of rape. In contrast, support for the right to abortion for any reason, because the woman is not married, or because the woman wants no more children has remained a minority, while support and opposition to the right to abortion for those who cannot afford more children due to low incomes have both fluctuated between about 40% and 60%. For the right to abortion in each of these cases (except abortion for any reason, which was not measured in 1973), comparing the mean of the most recent three years in which the survey was carried out (2008, 2010, and 2012) to a similar spread of surveys in 1973, 1975, and 1977 reveals a increase in opposition of between 1% and 10% (the mean increase in opposition was 6.5% and the mean decrease in support was also 6.5%).

[332] This is suggested by the findings from “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed March 20, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx; in May 2018, 48% of respondents considered themselves to be pro-life, but only 18% believed that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

Even the largest, most mainstream anti-abortion advocacy group, National Right to Life, implies that its mission involves ending all abortion: “The mission of National Right to Life is to protect and defend the most fundamental right of humankind, the right to life of every innocent human being from the beginning of life to natural death” (“National Right to Life Mission Statement,” National Right to Life Committee, accessed 05/03/19, https://www.nrlc.org/site/about/mission/). However, Donald Granberg, “The Abortion Activists,” Family Planning Perspectives 13, no. 4 (July-August 1981), 157-63 found that “7 in 10 NRLC members favored legal abortion if the woman's life would be endangered otherwise, and 4 in 10 NARAL members oppose abortion to prevent the birth of a child not of the desired sex.”

[333] Samuel J. Best and Benjamin Radcliff (eds.), Polling America: An Encyclopedia of Public Opinion (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2005), 4. They note that “In general, public opinion is much more accepting of sex outside of marriage than it was in the 1970s, gender role attitudes have moved in a direction more supportive of equality between the sexes, and female participation in the paid labor force has increased dramatically during this period. Since all of these variables are associated with pro-choice attitudes, it might be expected that support for legal abortion would have increased correspondingly during this period. The fact that such support has remained stable seems an important nonfinding.”

Data from the GSS seems to support these claims. The following statistics were all found at “Trends,” National Opinion Research Center, accessed May 8, 2019, https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends/. 34% of respondents believed that it was wrong to have sex before marriage in 1972, which fell fairly steadily to 17% in 2018. In 1977, 19% believed that it was better for the man to work and the woman to stay at home, which fell to 9% by 1985 and fell further to 5% by 2018. In 1972, 70% of respondents reported that they would vote for a woman president, which had risen to 95% by 2010. Slightly challenging the evidence of more liberal attitudes on a variety of sex and gender related issues, 22% of respondents in 1986 believed that birth control should be available to teens (14-16) if the parents don't approve; this number has fluctuated between 22% and 30%, with 28% agreeing in 2018. Note, however, that this question is not purely about the availability of birth control, since it also relates to parental consent.

[334] Tom W. Smith, “An Analysis of Cohort Differences on Abortion Attitudes, 1972-2006,” GSS Social Change Report 57 (December 2009) notes that, “for all seven abortion items support for abortion rights rises from the pre-1903 cohort to a peak in the 1944-1953 cohort and then declines generally to a low point in the 1984+ cohort.”

Elizabeth Adell Cook, Ted G. Jelen, and Clyde Wilcox, “Generational Differences in Attitudes Toward Abortion,” in Malcolm L. Goggin (ed.) Understanding the New Politics of Abortion (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993) also examined the GSS data, albeit from an earlier timepoint. On page 75, they conclude that “In the United States, our data show that the youngest cohorts of whites [referring to those that “reached age 18 after 1979”] are less supportive of legal abortion than those who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s. This pattern does not hold for blacks: Among African Americans the youngest cohorts are the most supportive of legal abortion, whereas among whites they are less supportive than some other cohorts.”

[335] For example, Wetstein, Abortion Rates uses data from the National Election Series Senate Panel Study, 1988-90, in a multivariate regression (using “a factor score from principal components analysis… to purge the negative effects” that “high collinearity between income and education… would have in multivariate regression equations). Wetstein finds that “For every 1 point increase in the SES scale, there was an increase of just over 6 percent in support for abortion rights” (β = 0.66, significant at p < 0.05). R2 for the model was 0.601. A multiple regression equation (R2 = 0.307) on page 69 shows that education had a significant effect (β = 0.20, p < 0.05) on a six-point scale representing abortion attitudes from 1988-9 General Social Survey data.

Using the same measure of support for abortion rights, Elizabeth Adell Cook, Ted G. Jelen, and Clyde Wilcox, Between Two Absolutes: Public Opinion and the Politics of Abortion (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 51 shows the clear differences: High school dropouts have a mean score of 3.19, compared to a mean score of 4.71 for post-graduates. They note on page 50 that “even after controls for all types of social characteristics, attitudes, and religious beliefs, education remains a strong predictor of liberal attitudes on abortion.” On pages 62-3, multivariate analysis finds that education is the most important included demographic predictor of abortion attitudes (beta > 0.2, with “urban roots” being the next highest, with beta being little over 0.1). However, the 9 included variables together explain only 9% of the variation in abortion attitudes in the General Social Survey.

[336] College enrollment in the United States from 1965 to 2016 and projections up to 2027 for public and private colleges (in millions)

Shows 10 million in 1973 up to 20 million in 2016

“Public Data,” Google, last updated July 6, 2018, https://www.google.com/publicdata/, which uses data from the World bank, shows that total population was 212 million in 1973, which rose to 323 million in 2016. Although total population is not the same as the population at a suitable age to enroll in college, this suggests that 4.5% of the population enrolled in college in 1973 compared to 6.1% in 2016.

[337] This point was made by Karissa Ann Haugeberg, “The violent transformation of a social movement: women and anti-abortion activism” (doctoral thesis, 2011), https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1333/, citing Samuel J. Best and Benjamin Radcliff (eds.), Polling America: An Encyclopedia of Public Opinion (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2005), 4.

[338] “Trends: Religious Preference,” National Opinion Research Center, accessed April 25, 2019 https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends/Religion%20&%20Spirituality?measure=relig_rec shows that 23% of respondents marked their religious preference as Catholic in 2018, compared to 27% in 1972. For “Christian: FndPrtstnt,Orthdx,ChrOth,” the percentages are 25% for 2018 and 28% for 1972, though numbers were higher in the 1980s and 1990s, with a peak of 36%.

“Religious Landscape Study,” Pew Research Center (2014) https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/ similarly found 25.4% evangelical Protestant and 20.8% Catholic. Comparing the 2007 and 2014 studies, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” Pew Research Center (May 2015) notes that the share of the population that is evangelical Protestant stayed roughly the same, at 26.3% and 25.4%, but that the share that is Catholic fell from 23.9% to 20.8%.

Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 1-2 notes that The Official Catholic Directory suggests that the percentage of the US population that is Catholic had grown from 15.8% in 1900 to 23.0% in 1997, although Prendergast notes that this data “rests on nothing resembling a census or even on a uniform consistent methodology throughout the nation… This count, based for the most part on estimates supplied by local clergy, is bound to be an underestimate, reflecting only the number of relatively active parishioners.” The Pew Research data suggests a decline since this time point anyway.

[339] See the paragraphs beginning “The Catholic Church has strongly opposed…” and “One paper found that ‘for every increase of 5 percent…” in the section on “Movement Composition.”

[340] For recent evidence on these developments, see Mats Blennow et al., “One-Year Survival of Extremely Preterm Infants After Active Perinatal Care in Sweden,” JAMA 301, no. 21 (2009), 2225-33. For an example of how this can affect debate, see Susan Okie, “Medical advances complicate abortion debate” (April 1989), https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/04/24/medical-advances-complicate-abortion-debate/3ea1bab4-7d3b-4410-84bb-6860fe4d2768/?utm_term=.bd142e6bd7ca.

[341] Cited in Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 118. However, on pages 117-9 they note that this survey “was based on women only, whereas all Gallup polls are nationwide surveys of adult men and women… Levels of support for abortion in the National Fertility Study were generally lower than those found in Gallup polls.”

[342] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 118. Support for the right to abortion when there was a risk to maternal health rose from 73% in 1965, to 87% in 1972, to 92% in 1973. Even more dramatically, suport for the right to abortion when a woman didn’t want any more children rose from 16% in 1965 to 40% in 1972 to 48% in 1973. GSS surveys for the rest of the decade show that levels of support for abortion rights in these contexts remained stable, with each measure usually varying by only 1%, 2% or 3% from year to year across each measure, with only a few exceptions, and with no clear trends.

[343] Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 130 note that the surveys each asked: “In general, do you favor or oppose the U.S. Supreme Court decision making abortions up to three months of pregnancy legal?” Support in polls in June 1972, August 1972, and February 1973 was 48%, 42% and 52% respectively. By February 1979, support had risen to 60%. The only survey where more people opposed than supported the decision was August 1972 (42% in favor, 46% in opposition).

[344] Marvin Olasky, The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988 (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988), 97 cites an earlier Gallup poll from 1962 that found that 52% thought that Sherri Finkbine (who travelled to Sweden to have an abortion after taking thalidomide) had “done the right thing,” 32% thought she had done wrong, and 16% had no opinion. Given that support rates for abortion in cases of fetal deformity reached around 80% in the 1970s, this shows lower levels of support.

Tatalovich and Daynes, The Politics of Abortion, 121 note that in summer 1972, a Gallup poll reported that “Two out of three Americans think abortion should be a matter for decision solely between a woman and her physician.” However, they note that “reference to a physician involved in making the decision along with the woman may have biased the results in a positive fashion. Moreover, as Blake suggested, ‘there is the initial reference to laws having already been changed and made more ‘liberal’. It is well known that respondents tend to agree with something that is presented as a legislative or judicial fait accompli.’’” This survey therefore cannot be taken as an indication that the state had no right to intervene to prevent elective abortion.

[345] “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed July 18, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx.

[346] For a discussion of this problem, see Nancy Felipe Russo and Jean E. Denious, “Why is abortion such a controversial issue in the United States?” in Linda J. Beckman and S. Marie Harvey (eds.) The New Civil War: The Psychology, Culture, and Politics of Abortion (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998), 45-52.

[347] “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed July 18, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx. The figures for “important” were taken by combining the answers “Candidate must share views” and “One of many important factors” and were contrasted to “Not a major issue” and “No opinion.” The figure fluctuated between 59% and 76%.

[348] Prendergast, The Catholic Voter, 197 notes that “Several surveys suggest that abortion policy was more important in affecting voting behavior in 1988 than in any prior presidential campaign and that it worked to Bush’s benefit. The poll conducted by ABC provided the most impressive evidence of these conclusions. Given an unlimited number of choices to name important issues, more respondents (33 percent of the total) cited abortion than any other single issue. In 1984, in response to a parallel question, somewhat differently phrased, 15 percent of those surveyed included abortion among the important issues. This poll reported that Bush received the vote of 57 percent of those who regarded abortion as important and Dukakis the vote of 42 percent. In 1984 Reagan was the choice of 63 percent of voters considering abortion important.” Two other surveys are cited as providing some further support for this.

[349] See footnote 47.

[350] See footnote 246.

[351] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 160-1. At a glance, it seems likely that the mean figure for each of these metrics is two to four times higher per year in the period 1995-2000 than per year in the period 1970-1995. There was a sharp rise in 1994-6 for each of these metrics.

[352] Ibid, 160-1.

[353] Greenhouse and Siegel, Before Roe v. Wade, 258 note that “The first justice to join the Court after Roe was John Paul Stevens, nominated in December 1975. His views on abortion were unknown, yet at his Senate confirmation hearing, he was not asked a single question about abortion.”

In contrast, views on abortion have come to sometimes be referred to as a litmus test for their appointment; this is a metaphor suggesting that their views on abortion are the single issue which might determine whether a candidate is appointed or not. See, for example, Kevin Daley, “Kirsten Gillibrand promises pro-abortion litmus test her judicial nominees” (May 2019), https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/07/kirsten-gillibrand-supreme-court/.

[354] Melody Rose, Safe, Legal, and Unavailable? Abortion Politics In the United States (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2006), 89 notes that abortion provides fell by 11% 1992-2000.

Cozzarelli and Major, “The Impact of Antiabortion Activities,” 87 noted that “the number of facilities providing abortions nationally has been decreasing at a rate of about 65 facilities per year since 1988. The overall number of providers dropped 8% between 1988 and 1992 and 18% between 1982 and 1992.

Sarah Hudson, "The Marginalization of Abortion in Medicine" (honors thesis, 2018), https://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection/532, 24 implies that the number of abortion providers fell 11% 1992-6, another 11% 1996-2000, and another 2% 2000-5, citing Lori Freedman, Willing and Unable: Doctors’ Constraints in Abortion Care (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010), 35

[355] Rachel K. Jones and Jenna Jeman, “Abortion Incidence and Service Availability, 2011,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 46, no. 1 (2014), 3-14, cited in Sarah Hudson, "The Marginalization of Abortion in Medicine" (honors thesis, 2018), https://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection/532.

[356] Jema K. Turk et al., “Availability and characteristics of abortion training U.S. ob-gyn residency programs: a national survey,” Contraception 89, no. 4 (2014), 271-7 and Jody E. Steinauer, Jema K. Turk, Tali Pomerantz, Kristin Simonson, Lee A. Learman, and Uta Landy, “Abortion training in US obstetrics and gynecology residency programs,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 219, no. 1 (July 2018), 86.e1–86.e6.

[357] Wikipedia, “List of anti-abortion organizations in the United States,” last edited January 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-abortion_organizations_in_the_United_States. Note that this list is not necessarily comprehensive.

[358] Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists, 91 and 209.

[359] John Daniel Childress, “Advocacy, Abortion, and Public Policy: Towards a Better Understanding of the Determinants of Abortion” (2010), https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/553687/childressJohn.pdf. Childress explains in a footnote that “Unless otherwise noted sums expended by advocacy organizations are calculated by the author using data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics. This database, which forms part of the dataset used to calculate my results, contains expense data as reported by non-profits on their IRS Form 990. Nationally, in 2004, organizations identified by NTEECC codes R61, R62 and E40 spent $249,334,114.”

[360] Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists, 92-3; see the spreadsheet “Munson's data on organization resources in four cities.” The mean budget was around $300,000, the median around $225,000. Among 29 organizations, there were 144 employees in total (mean 5, median 3). 19 organizations had a combined mailing list total of over 400,000 (mean 21,000, median 5,000) although presumably this double-counts those who subscribed to multiple mailing lists.

[361] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 92.

[362] Hussey, “The Pro-Life Pregnancy Help Movement,” 3 notes “While no one knows exactly how many pregnancy centers exist in the United States, a common estimate is 3,000 (Family Research Council 2009).”

[363] Cited in Hussey, “The Pro-Life Pregnancy Help Movement,” 17.

[364] Kelly Anthis, “Social Movement Lessons From the British Antislavery Movement: Focused on Applications to the Movement Against Animal Farming” (December 2017), https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/british-antislavery.

[365] For example, Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 120-43 describes how personal bereavement has encouraged dedication among some activists. Although advocates in both the anti-abortion and farmed animal movements work, in part, to prevent the perceived unnecessary “deaths” of the intended beneficiaries of their movements, personal bereavement does not seem to inspire individuals to advocate for farmed animals to the same degree.

[366] On ultrasound, see the paragraph beginning “Some states enforce mandatory ultrasound…” in the section on “Messaging.”

On symbollic imagery, see Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1987), 263-92. For example, on page 270, Petchesky notes that “The fetus as we know it is a fetish. Barbara Katz Rothman observes that ‘the fetus in utero has become a metaphor for 'man' in space, floating free, attached only by the umbilical cord to the spaceship. But where is the mother in that metaphor? She has become empty space.’ Inside the futurizing spacesuit, however, lies a much older image. For the autonomous, free-floating fetus merely extends to gestation the Hobbesian view of born human beings as disconnected, solitary individuals. It is this abstract individualism, effacing the pregnant woman and the fetus's dependence on her, that gives the fetal image its symbolic transparency, so that we can read in it ourselves, our lost babies, our mythic secure past.”

[367] Tara C. Jatlaoui, Maegan E. Boutot, Michele G. Mandel; Maura K. Whiteman, Angeline Ti, Emily Petersen, and Karen Pazol, “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Surveillance Summaries 67, No. SS13 (2018), 1-45.

[368] On this bias, see, for example, Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Andrew Schotter, “Present-bias, quasi-hyperbolic discounting, and fixed costs,” Games and Economic Behavior 69, no. 2 (July 2010), 205-23.

[369] Marvin Olasky, The Press and Abortion, 1838-1988 (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988) shows, for example, that though abortion services were widely publicized in the nineteenth century, this was often done indirectly, such as pills with a, irrelevant stated purpose but with prominent warnings that they were certain to result in “miscarriage.”

[370] See footnote 17. For a summary—and criticism—of some of this literature, see Keith Cassidy, “The Road to Roe: Cultural Change and the Growth of Acceptance of Abortion Prior to 1973,” Life and Learning 7 (1998), 1-16.

[371] Marshall H. Medoff, “An Economic Analysis of the Demand for Abortions,” Economic Inquiry 26, no. 2 (1988), 353-9.

Similarly, S. F. Gohmann and R. L. Ohsfeldt, “Effects of price and availability on abortion demand,” Contemporary Policy Issues 11, no. 4 (October 1993), 42-55 summarize that “The estimated coefficient of per capita income is positive with a point elasticity ranging from 0.62 to 1.0. The model with the most complete specifications has an abortion price elasticity range from -0.75 to -1.3 and is statistically significant when religion measures are excluded.”

[372] “The Effects of Diet Choices,” last updated March 2016, https://animalcharityevaluators.org/research/dietary-impacts/effects-of-diet-choices/

[373] A single decision to have an abortion or not will, in most cases, change the life of a mother (and likely the lives of family members or partners) for years to come, if not forever. A single decision to eat or avoid animal products only has, in most cases, immediate consequences that last a few minutes, if effects on animals, health, and the environment are not counted. Relatedly, since eating behaviors are much more regular, it is more difficult to legally circumvent state laws by going to a different state to purchase the product or service. If animal product demand is more elastic, this means that increases in the price and disruptions in the supply of animal products (whether through legislative change or direct activism) would be more likely to be effective in reducing consumption, although this also means that changes in the opposite direction could have a stronger effect on increasing consumption.

[374] See, for example, Isabel Wilkerson, “Drive Against Abortion Finds a Symbol: Wichita” (August 4, 1991), https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/04/us/drive-against-abortion-finds-a-symbol-wichita.html.

[375] “GDP-by-Industry,” US Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, last updated April 19, 2019, https://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=51#reqid=51&step=51&isuri=1&5114=a&5102=1

[376] Tara C. Jatlaoui, Maegan E. Boutot, Michele G. Mandel; Maura K. Whiteman, Angeline Ti, Emily Petersen, and Karen Pazol, “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Surveillance Summaries 67, No. SS13 (2018), 1-45.

[377] “How much does an abortion cost?” Planned Parenthood (December 2014), https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/teens/ask-experts/how-much-does-an-abortion-cost.

[378] “GDP-by-Industry,” US Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, last updated April 19, 2019, https://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=51#reqid=51&step=51&isuri=1&5114=a&5102=1.

[379] See the relevant subheadings in “Alphabetical Listing of Industries,” OpenSecrets.org, accessed May 3, 2019, https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/alphalist_indus.php.

[380] Debra B. Stulberg et al., “Abortion provision among practicing obstetrician-gynecologists,” Obstetrics and Gynecology 118, no. 3 (2011), 609 cited in Sarah Hudson, “The Marginalization of Abortion in Medicine” (honors thesis, 2018), https://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection/532, found that 97% of surveyed obstetrics and gynaecology professionals had seen at least one patient who requested an abortion although only 14% of surveyed professionals actually performed an abortion.

[381] See, for example, Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement.

[382] On stagnation, see the minor progress made on the movement’s goals in the section “The Extent of the Success of the Anti-Abortion Movement in US.”

On the possibility of a war of attrition breaking out, Staggenborg, The Pro-Choice Movement, 71 describes how NARAL “felt compelled to respond with a picket and boycott of the corporate sponsors of ‘Maude,’” a television show whose sponsors had withdrawn their support after anti-abortion activists pressured them to do so following an episode in which Maude chose to have an abortion. In this sense, the abortion rights movement was not free to choose how to spend its own resources but was compelled to use its resources to directly counter the activities of the anti-abortion movement, using similar methods.

Additionally, Joshua C. Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America’s Culture Wars (Stanford: Stanford Law Books, 2013), 12 describes the Supreme Court rulings of Planned Parenthood Shasta-Diablo Inc. v. Christine Williams (1995), Schenk v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York (1997), and Hill v. Colorado (2000) as “secondary movement litigation” because “the cases were not part of a broader, premeditated strategy by either movement. Rather they are unplanned reactions to the current form of the dispute. The second way in which they are secondary relates to the indirect relationship between the litigation and the movements’ ultimate goals. Both of these features are rooted in the greater conflict’s movement-countermovement dynamic… Taken together, neither side of these disputes necessarily planned to enter or stay in the courts, but they were essentially compelled to by their rival’s actions.”

However, none of these situations are directly comparable to the farmed animal movement, since that movement is unlikely to face a counter-movement with grassroots organizational strength. The farmed animal movement faces resistance from the animal agriculture industry and stakeholders, through humanewashing (see for instance Rachel Mathews, “Humanewashed: USDA Process Verified Program Misleads Consumers About Animal Welfare Marketing Claims,” Animal Welfare Institute, March 2012) and lobbying (see the relevant subheadings in “Agribusiness,” OpenSecrets.org, accessed May 3, 2019, https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indus.php), but these seem more like defensive actions than proactive mobilization to promote particular societal outcomes. Even so, it is plausible that certain tactics used towards companies or institutions could be replicated, or that opponents could simply become wise to the tactics being used by the farmed animal movement and plan for methods to counter these tactics.

The anti-abortion movement is, itself, perceived by some as a counter-movement. See for example David R. Dietrich, Rebellious Conservatives: Social Movements in Defense of Privilege (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

[383] On liberalism in the early anti-abortion movement, see, for example, Daniel K. Williams, “The Partisan Trajectory of the American Pro-Life Movement: How a Liberal Catholic Campaign Became a Conservative Evangelical Cause,” Religions 6 (2015), 451–75. On pages 451-3, Williams notes that at one protest considered, “All of the speakers… were liberals” and that “Although the annual March for Life had been started by a Catholic liberal Democrat, by the beginning of the Reagan era it had become infused with conservative Protestant evangelicalism and Republican Party politics.”

[384] Nossiff, Before Roe, 33 notes that “One reason for the success of the [nineteenth-century] physicians’ antiabortion campaign was the absence of opposing groups. Although the nineteenth-century women’s movement was organized by the 1860s, the majority of feminists were primarily concerned with securing the vote for women. Like the antiabortion physicians, many of them considered abortions to be a degrading procedure that exploited women, and they supported the [American Medical Association’s] attempts to criminalize it.”

Note also the existence of the group Feminists for Life. The Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion non-profit and Political Action Committee, is named after a nineteenth-century Suffragist, although there has been some dispute about her anti-abortion views. See, for example, the eight citations listed in the section “Susan B. Anthony and early feminist connection” on Susan B. Anthony List’s Wikipedia page, accessed May 6, 2019.

[385] For example, Carol Mason, “From Protest to Retribution: The Guerilla Politics of Pro-Life Violence,” in Kenton Worcester, Sally Avery Bermanzohn, and Mark Ungar (eds.) Violence and Politics: Globalization’s Paradox (New York: Routledge, 2002), 127-45 analyzes “an underground manual circulated in 1992 by Mark Crutcher… called Firestorm: A Guerilla Strategy for a Pro-Life America.” Page 139 notes that “Cruchtcher prescribes that… All guerrilla ‘legislation should be sold as ‘pro-women’ and/or ‘consumer protection’ legislation,” and admits that this rhetoric is used to disarm criticism from abortion rights advocates, rather than out of genuine concern.

[386] On anti-abortion, see the first paragraph in the section on “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement.”

[387] See the subsection on “1966-73: Legalization of abortion in some states and initial anti-abortion resistance” in the section on “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement.”

[388] For example, Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 540 notes that the New York State Right to Life Committee, founded by Edward Golden in 1967, “remained small for the first few years. Rosemary Nossiff notes that in the first year its budget was only $400 and that activity centered on writing letters to lawmakers and newspapers. By 1968, New York Right to Life members testified against a second bill introduced by Assemblyman Albert H. Blumenthal (D-69th District). Generally, however, the organization remained fairly unproductive until 1970 when the New York legislature repealed the state's century-old abortion law. After passage of the new statute, the group experienced tremendous growth through 1972 with thousands joining and new statewide affiliates forming from Buffalo to Long Island. In 1972 the state's pro-life organization had its moment of glory when it collaborated with legislators to repeal the 1970 Abortion Act. New York Right to Life raised money, sent lobbyists to Albany, demonstrated, and even warned lawmakers of political retribution if they failed to cast a pro-life vote.”

See also footnote 65.

[389] Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists, 124.

[390] Jacoby, Souls, Bodies, Spirits, 17-25. The survey was sent to a random sample of 50 (out of a total 500 identified) anti-abortion organizations; these 104 activists represent a response rate of 21%, although they come from 29 different states. Given selection bias, this survey probably represents some of the most engaged and opinionated anti-abortion activists who were contacted (the methodology is detailed on pages 200-1).

[391] Hussey, “The Pro-Life Pregnancy Help Movement,” summarizes that “when I asked the leaders I interviewed about where pregnancy centers fit into the wider pro-life movement and about the ties between pregnancy centers and other pro-life organizations, leaders consistently characterized pregnancy centers as a separate branch of the pro-life movement that, with some exceptions, had developed independently of the other branches… Centers largely distanced themselves from the “direct action” wing of the pro-life movement. 55 percent of centers [responding to Hussey’s survey] reported having an explicit policy forbidding their employees and volunteers from engaging in “sidewalk counseling” or demonstrations outside of abortion clinics. This figure probably greatly understates the distance between these wings, however, as many centers chose to clarify their responses in an open-ended comments section.”

[392] Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists, 124.

[393] See, for example, Erik Eckholm, “Anti-Abortion Groups are Split on Legal Tactics,” New York Times (December 2011), accessed March 4, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/health/policy/fetal-heartbeat-bill-splits-anti-abortion-forces.html.

[394] James R. Kelly, “Beyond Compromise: Casey, Common Ground, and the Pro-Life Movement,” in Mary C. Segers and Timothy A. Byrnes (eds.), Abortion Politics in American States (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015; first published 1995), paragraph 18.24 notes that “leaders of prominent social-movement organizations opposing abortion have regarded ‘common ground’ as a euphemism for morally compromising ‘middle-ground’ political efforts ot end the abortion controvery. No official representative of a social-movement organization opposing abortion ‘common ground.’ The National Right to Life president, Wanda Frantz, warned activists in NRLC’s 3,000 chapters that ‘common ground’ was a ‘clever pro-choice’ strategy seeking ‘to gain acceptance of the pro-abortion position as morally equivalent (or morally superior!) to the pro-life position.’ Randal Terry likened common ground to blacks negotiating with the Ku Klux Klan and Jews cooperating with Nazis. In a special issue of Sisterlife, the quarterly of Feminists for Life, Marilyn Kopp defended the ‘common-ground movement’ while Mary Bea Stout had doubts.” Note that while Terry (of Operation Rescue) represents a radical wing of the anti-abortion movement, the NLRC is one of the largest and most mainstream anti-abortion organizations.

[395] Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 42 describes one such debate at the local level, in St. Louis: “Ella remembered criticizing Dylan’s willingness to allow ‘pregnant women and manic depressives’ to sit-in. She had argued that e should choose tactics that would promote ‘good press’ and persuade the public to oppose abortion. This position suited her pragmatic approach to activism intended not only to stop abortions, but to persuade the public to disapprove of abortion… Dylan, guided by purist ideals, defended his tactics. He argued that rescue was an act of conscience, and he could not tell anyone to violate their conscience, regardless of their health conditions. But he took away from the argument a conviction to eschew publicity. After that argument, Dylan stopped calling the press before sit-ins because, he explained, his activism was a ‘witness’ that should compel others to join him.” From the “snowball sample” of activists (that is, they were mostly identified by other activists, rather than selected using a random method; the methodology is described on pages 4-5) in St. Louis, on page 203 Maxwell categorized 21% (17) as “pragmatists” and 75% (60) as “purists.”

[396] Munson, The Making of Pro-life Activists, 23 summarizes four studies by Luker, Granberg, Maxwell, and Jacoby. Studies from 1980 and 1981 have found 98% and 99% of anti-abortion activist participants to be white. In studies from 1979, 1980, 1991, and 1992, 38%, 37%, 40%, and 54% respectively were male. Over 50% had college degrees in all four surveys, representing rates more than double the national average at each time point, according to Ziad Munson’s analysis. Over two-thirds were married in all three studies that measured this. Munson’s own interviews with 82 anti-abortion activists found that 93% were white, 43% were male, and 71% had a college degree.

Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 23 found in a “snowball sample” of direct activists surveyed in St. Louis that 51% had a college degree or graduate/professional education, compared to 45% in a sample of the members of Missouri Citizens for Life. Maxwell notes on page 253 that the sample of 80 activists “included the only nonwhite individual anyone remembered participating in St. Louis’s sit-ins. She described her mother as white and her father as African American. Only one self-identified African American, a man, regularly demonstrated at clinics during my two years of fieldwork… echoing the ethnic makeup both Luker and Ginsburg described… However, since St. Louis was 51% African American, the preponderance of white activists is noteworthy.”

Note that none of these surveys were perfectly representative of the anti-abortion movement, however, since none take a random sample of activists.

[397] Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between Two Absolutes, 51 using data from the General Social Survey, 1987-91, note that the mean value on a six-point legal abortion scale is 4.08 for men and 3.84 for women, though they are lower (3.52) for housewives specifically. Categorized as “pro-choice,” “situationalist,” or “pro-life,” men are 41%, 53%, and 6% respectively, compared to 37%, 54%, and 9% respectively for women, but 29%, 60%, and 11% respectively for housewives. Note, that the table 2.2 appears to have mistakenly reversed the labels “pro-choice” and “pro-life”; they are reported here as their meaning is intended, rather than as is printed.

[398] Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between Two Absolutes, 51 using data from the General Social Survey, 1987-91, note that the mean value on a six-point legal abortion scale is 3.71 for “Blacks” and 3.99 for “Whites.” Categorized as “pro-choice,” “situationalist,” or “pro-life,” blacks are 33%, 58%, and 9% respectively, compared to 40%, 52%, and 8% respectively for whites. Note, that the table 2.2 appears to have mistakenly reversed the labels “pro-choice” and “pro-life”; they are reported here as their meaning is intended, rather than as is printed. On page 46, they note that “Why are blacks more likely than whites to oppose abortion? Several factors come into play. First, African-Americans are much more likely to oppose euthanasia (mercy killing), which is shown in Chapter 3 to be a strong predictor of abortion attitudes. Finally, blacks are more likely to hold orthodox religious beliefs, to attend doctrinally conservative churches, to attend church regularly, and to pray frequently… religious attitudes and behaviors are the strongest predictors of abortion attitudes… Indeed, after we control for attitudes and religion, African-Americans are significantly more supportive of legal abortion than whites.”

On page 46 they also note that “African-American women are twice as likely to have abortions as are white women, although this is primarily because they are more likely to become pregnant. A similar percentage of white and black pregnancies end in abortion.”

[399] Karrer, “The National Right to Life Committee,” 545 notes that at the June 1971 second NLRC conference, “Women composed 56 percent of the total, although they generally did not serve in leadership roles.”

Flowers, “Fighting the ‘Hurricane Winds,’” 5 notes that “Before and after Roe, women constituted the vast majority of the right-to-life grassroots (although the leadership was often male). As Kristin Luker argues, many framed their political activism through their status as concerned housewives and mothers, viewing abortion liberalization as an attack on the natural role of the mother in the home. In contrast, AUL’s [Americans United for Life’s] board was heavily dominated by men who grounded their activism with reference to their professional or leadership qualifications. All three women on the board led influential right-to-life groups, and one of them was a Harvard educated doctor. They used the same types of appeals to expertise and authority as the men. The large number of white-collar professionals and right-to-life leaders positioned AUL as a respectable, mature organization.”

However, Hussey, “The Pro-Life Pregnancy Help Movement,” 19 found that 92% of the crisis pregnancy centers that replied to a survey “reported having a woman as their executive director or chairman of the board,” and “national office staff at Care Net, Heartbeat International, and NIFLA are also over 80 percent female.”

[400] See, for example Wayne Drash and Curt Merrill, “Opposing groups protest outside abortion doctor's clinic” (August 2009), http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/08/29/nebraska.abortion.protests/index.html and Brian Erway, “When Buffalo sent Operation Rescue packing” (April 2017), https://socialistworker.org/2017/04/27/how-buffalo-sent-operation-rescue-packing.

[401] John H. Evans, “Polarization in Abortion Attitudes in U.S. Religious Traditions, 1972–1998,” Sociological Forum 17, no. 3 (September 2002), 398-9 characterizes this as the assumption of social movement scholars, and cites David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford, “Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986), 464–481.

[402] See footnote 338.

[403] See the section on “Movement composition” for discussion of some of the relevant considerations. In summary, many Catholics differ from the views of the Catholic leadership, and evangelical leaders did not initially take a strong stance on the abortion issue.

[404] See footnote 69.

[405] On Christian perspectives on abortion, see the section on “Movement Composition.”

[406] Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between Two Absolutes. Views on “Ideal Family Size” were also included, and had a similar coefficient to ideology. 7 demographic variables are also included. Overall, the model has an R2 value of 0.34.

[407] Wetstein, Abortion Rates, using data from the GSS of 1988 and 1989, modeled various survey answers as representing a single latent construct of abortion attitude. In multiple regression, views on premarital sex had a correlation of ß = 0.32. This was greater than religious intensity (ß = 0.13) or Church attendance (ß = 0.11), though views on teen sex had a lower correlation (ß = 0.07). Conducting a principal components analysis and using this to guide a LISREL structural equation model, Wetstein found that a "religious/moral factor has the greatest influence on the abortion attitude factor (Beta = .32). Next in importance are the socioeconomic factor (Beta = .30) and the sexual liberalism factor (.29), with the urban/rural factor having the smallest impact (.19)." This suggests that religious values and conservative values on sexuality are similarly important in determining abortion attitudes, but does not provide insight in how these issues compare to the value that individuals place on the protection of life and incorporating fetuses in humanity's moral circle. The multiple regression model had an R2 value of .307 and all these variables were significant at p = 0.05. The LISREL model had an R2 value of 0.43. Although this covers a large amount of variance, it suggests that there is a large amount of variance left unexplained by the included 4 factors and 8 indicators.

Jacoby, Souls, Bodies, Spirits, 17-25 notes the results of a survey of 104 activists from a random sample of 50 (out of a total 500 identified) anti-abortion organizations; these 104 activists represent a response rate of 21%< although they come from 29 different states. Given selection bias, this survey probably represents some of the most engaged and opinionated anti-abortion activists who were contacted (the methodology is detailed on pages 200-1). Jacoby notes that for one question about the role and size of government, “The traditional conservative response that ‘Government should act to PRESERVE the SOCIAL ORDER, but allow the ECONOMY to regulate itself’ meets with the approval of only 21.2% of respondents. Only 7.7% chose the liberal response that ‘Government should PROMOTE ECONOMIC EQUALITY, but allow INDIVIDUALS to regulate their SOCIAL BEHAVIOR.” However, the respondents were closely aligned to the Republican Party; in 1992, only 2.9% of respondents voted for Clinton. Other questions showed support for balancing the federal budget, but also for national health insurance.

[408] See, for example, Ted G. Jelen, “Gender role beliefs and attitudes toward abortion: A cross-national exploration,” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 5, no. 1 (2015), 11-22.

[409] The more strongly we believe that the farmed animal advocacy movement faces weaker moral opposition than the anti-abortion movement does, the more we should expect that change through farmed animal advocacy is relatively more tractable. There may be some nonobvious, indirect mechanisms through which this makes change in the farmed animal movement even more tractable, such as if it makes a “radical flank effect” that benefits moderate advocacy groups more likely.

For example,  Suzanne Staggenborg, “The Survival of the Pro-Choice Movement,” in Donald T. Critchlow (ed.) The Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996; first published 1995), 176 notes in a footnote that a “radical-flank effect” is the impact of more radical groups within a movement on more moderate groups. As Herbert Haines shows in Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 194-70 (Knoxville, 1988), this effect can be either negative or positive. In the case of the civil rights movement, Haines found a positive radical-flank effect when black power groups came into the movement. As a result of their presence, the resources of moderate civil rights organizations increased as contributions came in from those who preferred the moderate goals of integration and civil rights to the radical goals of separatism and black power. In this instance, however, the moderate groups had already established the legitimacy of their cause and had gained widespread public sympathy prior to the emergence of the black power movement. Anti-abortion groups, however, have always had to battle with abortion rights groups for the moral upper hand (and there have always been some more radical groups within the anti-abortion movement). Consequently, moderate groups were not able to establish themselves as the proponents of an undeniably just cause like civil rights before a highly visible radical flank entered their movement.”

[410] See, for example, Rebecca J. Kreitzer, “Politics and Morality in State Abortion Policy,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2015), 41-66.

[411] Rebecca J. Kreitzer, “Politics and Morality in State Abortion Policy,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 15, no. 1 (2015), 41-66 found that “The two variables that represent the policy movers in morality policy—public opinion and constituent religious adherence—are both significant predictors of anti-abortion rights policy, but only public attitudes predict pro-abortion rights policy. Kreitzer notes that “This makes theoretical sense. If morality policy is characterized by technical simplicity and framed in terms of core values, the most common liberalizing policies do not really fit the bill... Instead, they are framed in terms of safety, equal access to medical care, or free speech. Despite regulating access to abortion, which is almost universally considered a morality policy, liberalizing abortion policies are not ‘moral’ in nature.”

[412] James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 42-6. Hunter defines “cultural conflict very simply as political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding.” The ideals “always have a character of ultimacy to them. They are not merely attitudes that can change on a whim but basic commitments and beliefs that provide a source of identity, purpose, and togetherness for the people who live by them.”

Referring to a similar phenomenon, Jacoby, Souls, Bodies, Spirits, 7-9 describes “The Moral Crusade” as being one way of interpreting the abortion debate, as opposed to as a “Social Movement” or a “Religious Revival.”

[413] This is clear from the various interviews included in Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America. Ginsburg, “Saving America’s Souls,” 558 quotes Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue: “There are a lot of people who believe this is going to be the seedbed of revival in the church, the locomotive to bring reformation in our culture. When the Lord put the vision in my heart, it was not just to rescue babies and mothers but to rescue the country. This is the first domino to fall.”

[414] Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between Two Absolutes, 51 using data from the General Social Survey, 1987-91, note that the mean value on a six-point legal abortion scale is 4.08 for men and 3.84 for women, though they are lower (3.52) for housewives specifically. Categorized as “pro-choice,” “situationalist,” or “pro-life,” men are 41%, 53%, and 6% respectively, compared to 37%, 54%, and 9% respectively for women, but 29%, 60%, and 11% respectively for housewives. Note, that the table 2.2 appears to have mistakenly reversed the labels “pro-choice” and “pro-life”; they are reported here as their meaning is intended, rather than as is printed. This suggests relatively little difference between men and women.

Support for feminism seems to be a poor predictor of abortion attitudes (see the paragraph in this section beginning “Using data from the General Social Surveys of 1989 to 1991…”).

[415] On anti-abortion attitudes, see footnote 334.

[416] See footnote 335.

[417] Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox, Between Two Absolutes, 51 using data from the General Social Survey, 1987-91, note that the mean value on a six-point legal abortion scale is 3.71 for “Blacks” and 3.99 for “Whites.” Categorized as “pro-choice,” “situationalist,” or “pro-life,” blacks are 33%, 58%, and 9% respectively, compared to 40%, 52%, and 8% respectively for whites. Note, that the table 2.2 appears to have mistakenly reversed the labels “pro-choice” and “pro-life”; they are reported here as their meaning is intended, rather than as is printed. On page 46, they note that “Why are blacks more likely than whites to oppose abortion? Several factors come into play. First, African-Americans are much more likely to oppose euthanasia (mercy killing), which is shown in Chapter 3 to be a strong predictor of abortion attitudes. Finally, blacks are more likely to hold orthodox religious beliefs, to attend doctrinally conservative churches, to attend church regularly, and to pray frequently… religious attitudes and behaviors are the strongest predictors of abortion attitudes… Indeed, after we control for attitudes and religion, African-Americans are significantly more supportive of legal abortion than whites.”

On page 46, they also note that “African-American women are twice as likely to have abortions as are white women, although this is primarily because they are more likely to become pregnant. A similar percentage of white and black pregnancies end in abortion.”

[418] See, for example, the links and citations at Amelia Stewart, “The Economics of Abortion” (January 2017), https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-economics-of-abortion.

[419] As noted in “Summary of Evidence for Foundational Questions in Effective Animal Advocacy,” Sentience Institute, last updated June 21, 2018, https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/foundational-questions-summaries, “Moral circles may trend towards a setpoint, and if so it seems like that’s most likely a point that includes the most powerful beings and excludes those whose inclusion would not increase the society’s power, or in other words excludes those who are more of a burden and cost more resources to care for than they contribute to the selfish interests of the powerful.”

If population were low and growth were desired, then preventing abortion may bring societal economic benefits. Indeed, various economic arguments seem to have been used on both sides of the debate. For an example an anti-abortion advocacy piece using economic arguments, see “The Economy and Abortion,” National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, accessed May 6th, 2019, https://nifla.org/the-economy-and-abortion/. However, for much of the anti-abortion movement, demographic arguments have weighed in favor of abortion rights. For example, in 1972, the Commission on Population Growth and America’s Future recommended “The liberalization of state abortion laws along the lines of the New York State statute.” See “Chapter 11: Human Reproduction,” The Center for Research on Population and Security, accessed May 6th, 2019, https://www.population-security.org/rockefeller/011_human_reproduction.htm. This was later denounced by Nixon and the Catholic bishops.

[420] “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed May 6, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx.

[421] See footnote 222.

[422] Jacy Reese, “Survey of US Attitudes Towards Animal Farming and Animal-Free Food October 2017” (November 2017), https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/animal-farming-attitudes-survey-2017#exploratory-demographic-analysis.

[423] “The General Social Survey 2012 Final Report: Trends in Public Attitudes towards Abortion,” National Opinion Research Center (May 2013), https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/documents/878/download.

[424] See the spreadsheet “Abortions and the abortion ratio by year.”

[425] See the section “1980-92: Ronald Reagan, the diversification of anti-abortion tactics, and an increasingly anti-abortion Supreme Court” above, especially the paragraph beginning “The years 1984 and 1985 saw the peak…” See also the tab “Comparison of violence to the abortion ratio” in the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents.”

[426] Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 1-3 and 31 notes that direct action tactics first began in the mid 1970s. Looking at the data on abortion incidence, rates, and ratios (i.e. figure 1 above and the data on the spreadsheet “Abortions and the abortion ratio by year”) one could conclude that the slope of the increase began to decrease at this time, slightly before this, or slightly after this. The increase seems to have levelled off entirely and begun to decline some time between 1980 and 1988; the former date seems unrelated to any substantial changes in direct action or sidewalk counseling actions but the latter date seems plausibly consistent with the increase in direct action tactics (see the paragraph beginning “The years 1984 and 1985 saw the peak…” in the section on “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement”). The decreases in violent activity and arrests but increases in other forms of disruptive activity around 1994 (see the paragraph beginning “In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously…” in the section on “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement”) do not seem to have had a substantial effect on the slope of the decline in abortion incidence, rates, and ratios. However, this too, is unclear; the increase in picketing around 1996-8 could be related to sharper drops in abortion incidence and the abortion ratio at that time.

[427] Stanley K. Henshaw and Kathryn Kost, “Trends in the Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortions, 1974 to 2004” (August 2008), https://www.guttmacher.org/report/trends-characteristics-women-obtaining-abortions-1974-2004-supplemental-tables.

[428] Tara C. Jatlaoui, Maegan E. Boutot, Michele G. Mandel; Maura K. Whiteman, Angeline Ti, Emily Petersen, and Karen Pazol, “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2015,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Surveillance Summaries 67, No. SS13 (2018), 1-45.

[429] See the spreadsheet “Abortions and the abortion ratio by year,” which uses various reports by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

[430] For the numbers in the declines, see the section on “Provider Availability” in “The Extent of the Success of the Anti-Abortion Movement in US.”

For the importance of this factor, see footnotes 479 and 125.

[431] Stanley K. Henshaw, “Barriers to access to abortion services,” in Linda J. Beckman and S. Marie Harvey (eds.) The New Civil War: The Psychology, Culture, and Politics of Abortion (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998), 61-80.

[432] Sarah Hudson, "The Marginalization of Abortion in Medicine" (honors thesis, 2018), https://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection/532, 47 summarizes that both stigma and the lack of integration between abortion services and private practices seem to have contributed to the difficulties of providing abortions, although Hudson does not note that these factors increased in importance at this time.

[433] See the discussion of “Incremental legislation that restricts access to abortions” in the section on “Institutional Reform.”

[434] See the discussion of “Incremental legislation that restricts access to abortions” in the section on “Institutional Reform.”

[435] “Public Data,” Google, last updated July 6, 2018, https://www.google.com/publicdata/, which uses data from the World Bank. The site notes that “Contraceptive prevalence rate is the percentage of women who are practicing, or whose sexual partners are practicing, any form of contraception. It is usually measured for married women ages 15-49 only.” The measurement for 1995 is higher, at 76%, and this forms part of a gradual upwards trend from 68% in 1976 to 77% in 2007. The potential importance of this factor was suggested in Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 124.

Jeanne Sneftrup Jensen, “Changes in the US abortion rate since the 1990s” (student thesis, 2010), https://studenttheses.cbs.dk/handle/10417/896 notes that “between 1995 and 2002 the use of contraceptives, among Black and White women, actually fell.”

[436] Jeanne Sneftrup Jensen, “Changes in the US abortion rate since the 1990s” (student thesis, 2010), https://studenttheses.cbs.dk/handle/10417/896. Jensen also notes that “between 1994 and 2000, experts believe that 43 per cent of the decrease in total abortions can be attributed to increased use of emergency contraceptives.” However, the source of this claim is unclear; neither of the cited Guttmacher Institute reports refer to this figure.

[437] Heather D. Boonstra, “Emergency Contraception: The Need to Increase Public Awareness,” Guttmacher Report on Public Policy 5, no. 4 (October 2002), https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2002/10/emergency-contraception-need-increase-public-awareness

[438] “Public Data,” Google, last updated July 6, 2018, https://www.google.com/publicdata/, which uses data from the World Bank. However, this trend shows no obvious change in the 1990s, having grown from $6,741 in 1973.

William R. Cline, “U.S. Median Household Income Has Risen More Than You Think,” (2019), https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/winter-2019/us-median-household-income-has-risen-more-you-think argues that household median income has continued to grow as well.

[439] Childress, “Advocacy, Abortion, and Public Policy,” 41-3 found in multivariate regression that “A one standard deviation increase in log median income results in a 14.6% decrease in aggregate abortion rates.” This was consistent with Childress’ expectations, outlined on pages 33-4; “Since women with higher incomes will have to dedicate a smaller proportion of their income to child bearing and other costs, all else equal, increases to median income are expected to decrease aggregate abortion rates.” Childress summarizes relevant previous research on pages 10-2 and 17-8.

Medoff, “An Economic Analysis,” 353-9, who finds that “the fundamental law of demand holds for abortions, with the price elasticity of demand equal to - .81. Abortions are a normal good with an income elasticity of demand equal to .79.

However, New, “Analyzing the Effect of State Legislation” found an insignificant correlation between the dependent variable of the abortion rate among minors and per capita personal income growth in a state (resulting in a reduction in the minor abortion rate by an average of 0.04 abortions per 1,000 females between the ages of 13 and 17,” p > 0.01). The unit for per capita income growth is unclear.

[440] “Labor force participation rate, female (% of female population ages 15+) (modeled ILO estimate),” The World Bank, accessed May 9, 2019, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?locations=US.

Medoff, “An Economic Analysis,” 353-9 found that “The demand for abortions is also positively related to the labor force participation of women.”

[441] “Key facts about sexual activity among teens,” Child Trends, accessed May 9, 2019, which uses data from “1991-2015 High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2016), http://nccd.cdc.gov/youthonline/. The potential importance of this factor was suggested in Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 124.

[442] Childress, “Advocacy, Abortion, and Public Policy,” 41-3 found in multivariate regression that “a one standard deviation increase in fertility rates results in a 7.1% increase in aggregate abortion rates.”

However, “Public Data,” Google, last updated July 6, 2018, https://www.google.com/publicdata/, which uses data from the World Bank, shows no notable change in the 1990s, from 2.08 births per woman in 1990 (the timeframe is unclear; presumably this is across their whole life) to 2.06 in 2000. Longer-term, there was little change from 1.77 in 1995 to 1.8 in 2016; the mid 1980s to mid 2000s marked a slightly higher rate than the previous or following years.

[443] See the section on “1992-2000: Bill Clinton, declining violence, and declining abortion incidence” in “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement.” The chronology there can be compared to that of the changes in abortion incidence, as shown on the spreadsheet “Abortions and the abortion ratio by year.”

[444] “Historical racial and ethnic demographics of the United States,” Wikipedia, last edited April 7, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States, which uses several data sources.

[445] “Abortion rates by race and ethnicity,” Guttmacher Institute, accessed May 9, 2019, https://www.guttmacher.org/infographic/2017/abortion-rates-race-and-ethnicity.

[446] Kim Parker and Renee Stepler, “As U.S. marriage rate hovers at 50%, education gap in marital status widens” (September 2017), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/14/as-u-s-marriage-rate-hovers-at-50-education-gap-in-marital-status-widens/. The figures for 1990 and 2000 are not listed separately, but appear to be little different from each other. The longer-term trend is clear, but this appears to bear little relation to the trend in abortion rates.

[447] See footnote 356.

[448] Medoff, “The Impact of Anti-Abortion Activities,” 265-82.

[449] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 145-7. These reported results are for the model using the impact of one to four incidents on abortion providers. This model indicates, for example, that “a 1 percent increase in picketing at staff members’ homes in associated with a .052 percent decrease in abortion providers, controlling for the demand, political, and control variables.” Modelling the impact of five to nineteen yearly incidents of each activity type separately, Doan found that such additional levels of picketing of staff homes had a further significant negative effect, but this was not the case for picketing with contact, vandalism, or bomb threats. Oddly, the number of incidents of picketing clinics became significant in this model.

Unlike in some other papers, “the models overall perform well, which is reflected in the range of adjusted R2-values from a low of .722 to a high of .731.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, “the abortion rate and NARAL membership are the most influential variables included in the models.”

[450] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 140-2. Doan summarizes that “the regression coefficients indicate that a 1 percent increase in facilities experiencing picketing one to four times a year is associated with a .049 decline in the abortion rate per 1,000 women [aged 15-44 (p = .002)], controlling for the resource, access, demographics, and control variables. A 1% increase in the proportion of clinics experiencing five to nineteen yearly incidents had an effect of -.034 (p < .05) on the abortion rate.

Doan notes that “All of the models perform pretty well, reflected by the adjusted R2-value, which ranges from .796 to .804 in the models.”

[451] Jacobson and Royer, “Aftershocks,” 191. They add that “The response varies by type of attack, e.g., damage-related acts (typically arson) versus murders of abortion providers. In areas where a murder has occurred, we observe declines in abortions and providers nearly 10 times the size of the average effect, albeit imprecisely measured due to the infrequency of murders. Because murder generates substantially less property damage than arson and bombing, one might infer that the effects of violence we measure are not purely mechanical (i.e., effects due to clinic closings). Additionally, the effect size is not correlated with the dollar value of damage, suggesting that our estimates capture some behavioral response, rather than an incapacitation response, to terror. The reductions in abortions and providers persist for several years after an attack.” They note that “In the 7-11 months following an anti-abortion attack, births increase by about 1 percent among women residing in targeted areas. In the long run, births are unaffected. The short-run rise in births accounts for only 10 percent of the decline in abortions in affected areas. We look more explicitly for displacement effects by analyzing the abortion market in counties neighboring the violence. Abortion and provider rates rise in counties nearest to the violence.”

On page 191 they explain that they “combine detailed violence data with pre-existing county-level abortion and birth data. We compare within-county provider rates, abortion rates, and births before and after an act of extreme violence. We also investigate whether and how the violence impacts abortion services in counties adjacent to but not directly targeted by an attack.”

[452] Gary S. Becker and Yona Rubinstein, “Fear and the Response to Terrorism: An Economic Analysis,” Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Papers (2011) found that “the overall impact of [suicide bombing] attacks on the usage of goods and services subject to terror attacks (e.g. bus services, coffee shops) reflects solely the reactions of occasional users. We find no impact of terrorist attacks on the demand for these goods and services by frequent users. Education and the exposure to media coverage also matters. We find a large impact of suicide attacks during regular media coverage days, and almost no impact of suicide attacks when they are followed by either a holiday or a weekend, especially among the less educated families and among occasional users.”

[453] See the paragraph beginning “One paper finds that ‘the fundamental law…” in the section on “Features of the Anti-Abortion Movement.”

[454] See the list above of “Other factors that may have contributed to the decline” in abortion rates.

[455] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 117-8 notes that in Bryan, Texas, Planned Parenthood’s newly opened facility in 1999 was “ushered in with continual pro-life protesting… Within three years, the clinic’s director was the only employee remaining from the original facility. All other employees had left largely as a result of the strains of the weekly, and often daily, harassment.”

[456] David A. Grimes, Jacqueline D. Forrest, Alice L. Kirkman, and Barbara Radford, “An epidemic of antiabortion violence in the United States,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 165, no. 5 (November 1991), 1266. On page 1267 they add that “The true cost of this epidemic is hard to estimate. As noted, the direct cost of $7.6 million is a substantial underestimate because of the exclusion of a number of facilities that were completely destroyed. The related costs of increased expenses for legal and security services, increased fire and casualty insurance, new licensing requirements, and staff recruitment have not been estimated but are large. In addition, the indirect costs of time lost from work during repair and reconstruction are substantial. Patients seeking abortion or other services were forced to postpone care or transfer to another provider. The cost of investigation, prosecution, and incarceration of perpetrators also is large. These costs may translate into higher fees for patients and rising costs of law enforcement.”

[457] See the section on “Changes in the Importance and Salience of the Issue.”

[458] On violence, see the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents.”

On newspaper and magazine coverage, see Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 158-9.

[459] This comment is based on a comparison of the data in the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents” and Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 159 to the information in the section on “Changes in the Importance and Salience of the Issue.”

[460] Cassidy, “The Right to Life Movement,” 128 notes that the mass media has created stereotypes and impressions of the movement; it has been “the subject of numerous television dramas, documentaries, and news accounts. Television portrayals in particular have created a number of negative images. The movement is seen as violent, irrational, insensitive to women, religiously fundamentalist in character, and extremist.” On pages 130-1 Cassidy notes that even in the academic literature, scholars such as Kristin Luker have characterized the anti-abortion movement as interested more in defense of traditional gender roles than protection of life. In contrast, Cassidy argues that this is an oversimplification, ignoring the aspects of the movement most focused on altruism and civil rights issues. He cites surveys suggesting that more people who oppose gender equality favor legal abortion than oppose it.

James Davison Hunter, “What Americans Really Think About Abortion,” First Things 24 (June-July 1992), using the results of several surveys commissioned by anti-abortion groups in 1990, summarizes that both abortion rights and anti-abortion advocates view their own movement “as being much more concerned about values, morality, and the family.” However, “Outside of the rank-and-file of the anti-abortion movement, the average American, even when numbered among the closest allies of the anti-abortion movement, i.e., the secretly and conveniently pro-life groups, tends to view the anti-abortion movement in the same negative way that the pro-choice coalitions do. The average American is much more likely to view the anti-abortion movement as unconcerned about women and the poor, and marked by judgmentalism, extremism, and intolerance… The success of the activists of the abortion rights movement in demonizing the anti-abortion movement is all the more surprising when one compares image to reality. When asked in the surveys to express their personal concerns on a wide range of issues, individuals who identified themselves as being ‘pro-life’ were, with but a few exceptions, as ‘liberal’ as, and in most cases even more ‘liberal’ than, the so-called socially progressive abortion rights groups. On average, pro-lifers were significantly more likely to express concern about child abuse, drug abuse, poverty and homelessness, and population growth than were the pro-choice. They also consistently showed as much concern for the issues of racial discrimination, minority rights, and women’s rights as their opponents. It was only the consistently pro-choice who were more likely to express more concern for women’s rights.”

Donald Granberg, “The Abortion Activists,” Family Planning Perspectives 13, no. 4 (July-August 1981), 157-63 found in a survey sent to 750 members of each of NARAL and NRLC that “The majority of NLRC members oppose the Equal Rights Amendment; majority of NARAL supports it. The majority of members of both organizations support political, social and economic equality of women in other respects.”

[461] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 87 notes about rescue tactics that “As pro-choice groups organized and had counterprotesters at clinics, the blockades started to become more antagonistic. Arguing repeatedly erupted between the two sides and often deteriorated into shoving, grabbing, and screaming matches. The physical and verbal aggression was recorded by the media, and Operation Rescue was beginning to be portrayed as the victimizer, particularly as OR members became more aggressive against women trying to enter clinics.

[462] On polling, see “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed March 20th, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx. The question asked was: “With respect to the abortion issue, would you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life?” Note that the FACE Act was passed in 1994, and violence began to decline around this time.

On violence, see the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents.”

[463] The most plausible other factors are a backlash against the administration of Bill Clinton, who was favorable towards abortion rights, or the declining rates of abortion during this period. The author of this report would not expect either of these trends to have a particularly large effect of “pro-life” identification, however. See the section on “1992-2000: Bill Clinton, declining violence, and declining abortion incidence” in “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement” for some detail on these developments.

[464] See the tab “Comparison of violence to public opinion” on the spreadsheet “Count of violent and disruptive incidents.” There is quite a strong correlation between the decline in the number of people identifying as “pro-choice” in the years 1995-7 and the decrease in percentage of clinics reporting moderate or severe violence, but the count of “violent incidents” is much more erratic in this period.

[465] See “In Depth: Topics A to Z: Abortion,” Gallup, accessed July 18, 2019, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx and footnote 284.

[466] Wlezien and Goggin, “The Courts,” 396. For context, see the paragraph beginning “In 1989, the five-to-four…” in “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement.” Unlike the activities of anti-abortion groups, the activities of abortion rights groups seem to have had no effect on public opinion.

[467] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 87 notes that “Various cities also began to tire of Operation Rescue’s antics because they were costing cities considerable amounts of money as well as redirecting law enforcement efforts away from their regular beats to monitor, control, and disperse blockades. One city paid around $10,000 in law enforcement and vehicle fees resulting from one day of protesting.”

[468] A similar point is made by Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 3: “Devoid of context, protesting at clinics is not inherently threatening; however, anti-abortion activity exists within a backdrop of inflammatory rhetoric, physical threats, and executed threats in the form of chemical attacks, arson, and murder, which have been carried out in the name of saving babies. Contextualizing anti-abortion protest and coupling it with its intended targets (clinic employees, women seeking abortion services, and potential women in need of abortion services) changes the scope and meaning of the protest altogether. Rather than benign political protest, much of the activity outside of clinics takes on a threatening element that transcends political protest and becomes harassment.”

On pages 106-8 Doan quotes several leaders of anti-abortion groups disavowing violent tactics.

Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 80-9 similarly argues that “[v]iolent and extremely aggressive acts appear to have discredited direct action, alienated the majority of potential recruits, and exacerbated divisions within the pro-life movement.”

Additionally, Feminist Majority Foundation, “2018 National Clinic Violence Survey” (2019), https://www.feminist.org/anti-abortion-violence/images/2018-national-clinic-violence-survey.pdf groups “blocking clinic access” alongside “severe violence and threats of violence,” though this comes from a partisan source.

The author of this report has not seen evidence that the association between disruptive and violent tactics has led to legal or legislative restrictions on nonviolent disruptive tactics, although it is plausible that this could happen. In the 1997 court case, Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western New York, buffer zones around abortion clinics were upheld, preventing protestors from getting too close. It seems plausible that this decision was influenced by the violent tactics of the movement, though the author of this report has not seen evidence for or against this hypothesis.

[469] Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 50 describes an incident where a group that had planned “a silent prayer vigil outside a hospital administrator’s home” were “slapped with lawsuits for millions of dollars” after activists from a local direct action group arrived, uninvited, “with bullhorns and picket signs.”

[470] See the paragraph beginning “1994, the Supreme Court ruled…” in the section on “A Condensed Chronological History of the Anti-Abortion Movement.”

[471] Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 40-1 notes that “Injunctions for separate clinics were issued one at a time by different judges. St. Louis had four abortion clinics when pro-life direct action began; after injunctions had been issued against sit-ins at the two most frequently targeted clinics, Meadow Park and Women's Health Center, the activists saw two options. They could continue sitting-in at Meadow Park, their primary site, in spite of the injunction and risk the relatively certain penalties such action would bring, or they could redirect their activism toward a different clinic. After intense debate, they chose to do the latter... This choice was repeated later, when an injunction prohibited sit-ins at a third clinic.”

Ginsburg, “Saving America’s Souls,” 568-71 notes the various “legal setbacks” faced by Operation Rescue in 1989-90. On page 570, Ginsburg notes that “By the fall of 1990, there was a noticeable decline in the mention of abortion in Terry's rhetoric, and a former political liaison for Operation Rescue ran for a seat on the New York state assembly from the Binghamton area. It appeared that Operation Rescue's anti-abortion activities had been stymied by the multiple legal actions brought against the organization and its followers.”

[472] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 86 notes that “By 1990, Operation Rescue’s activities had significantly diminished—a paltry 34 blockades were held that year, and only 1,363 protesters were arrested [compared to 201 and 12,358 respectively in the previous year]. The quick decline in activity can be attributed to pro-choice counter-activity. Although abortion rights activists were initially taken by surprise, after a couple of years they had developed fairly successful counterstrategies such as implementing clinic escort services and challenging the legality of Operation Rescue’s blockades.”

[473] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 84-6 notes that “The pro-life movement was reinvigorated in the mid-1980s by the emergence of new leaders. These new leaders turned the focus away from national politics to grassroots direct action, bringing new enthusiasm (grounded in scriptural language) and a youthful edge to the movement… Randall Terry… was a dynamic, charismatic leader who was able to attract thousands of members to [Operation Rescue]. He knew how to finesse the media and became a master at issuing colorful sound bites, guaranteeing him time in the press… The Siege of Atlanta garnered much media attention leading to a substantial influx of resources into Operation Rescue…. Other rescues were planned throughout the country… Operation Rescue took its blockades to New York, Philadelphia, Wichita, and Los Angeles, to name a few. These rescues attracted hundreds and oftentimes thousands of protesters to a single abortion clinic. Activists were able to physically shut down the clinic by blockading the building, thereby making it impossible for clinic staff or clients to enter the building. Operation Rescue’s blockades eventually peaked. In 1988 it held 182 blockades, resulting in 11,732 arrests, and in 1989, 12,358 people were arrested at approximately 201 blockades.”

On page 88, Doan notes that Operation Rescue had “a staff of 23 and received over one million dollars in annual donations” at its peak. These numbers seem quite small compared to some farmed animal advocacy organizations, however.

On pages 88-9, Doan also notes several examples of radical activists who first connected with each other through Operation Rescue.

Maxwell, Pro-Life Activists in America, 31-40 describes the activists who were inspired to join direct action protests in St. Louis, which were described to Maxwell by later activists. For example, Maxwell writes on page 32 that “representatives remained hours after official exhibits [at anti-abortion conventions] closed explaining their philosophy and tactics to keenly interested individuals.” Maxwell describes the activists as mostly Catholic, including students, those frustrated by the slow progress of the “mainstream” anti-abortion movement, and those feeling betrayed by Democrat politicians or Catholic bishops.

[474] Doan, Opposition & Intimidation, 87 notes that In New York City, a trial court ordered Operation Rescue to pay a $50,000 contempt fine after it ignored the court’s order prohibiting blockades of clinics in New York City. When Operation Rescue refused to pay the fine it continued to increase. By 1990, Operation Rescue owed $450,000 in fines.”